Culebronchris

Does anyone know how postal addresses are assigned in Spain? Is it the Town Hall/Local Police, the Post Office, Catastro or some other august body? I do not need to know - I'm just interested and Google doesn't seem to know.

The reason it's on my mind is that I had a lot of trouble trying to complete a form from my UK bank, the HSBC, which wanted me to confirm my address.

We live a bit out of town, in a village, and our address varies from organisation to organisation because of the strengths or weaknesses of their databases. Our post code is a bit of a movable feast too. Correos, as an organisation, is clear what our postcode is but the Correos staff in our local town told us to use the post code of that town and not the official one. It makes very little real difference until one lot of bureaucracy bumps into another.

snikpoh

The address you have to use is that in your escritura as issues by the town hall.

For us, as we live in the countryside, we have to use Partida la Solana x, Parcela, y

Postal codes in Spain are per town. So ours is 46870 which covers about 33,000 people!

bobd22

Even in villages it gets confusing. When we first bought the address was wrong for somethings. I queried this with the solicitor who said well the address in Spain can change as they change street names and number now and again. Only way to be certain was the property registration number on escrutira as that doesn't change.

Loafing Along

Normally done by the local municipal council. As an individual you can actually propose a street name and then it goes through an evaluation process - in Madrid there about three steps from local district through Culture Committee to the Madrid government. Remember in the '80s when we lived in Madrid our street was suddenly re-numbered , nothing had changed but it was decided there were more properties than originally thought and we moved from Nº 24 to Nº 32 one sunny day.

Fred James

We live in the campo and our address is the name of the house and the road. When we moved in, we had to modify our Padron entry and that address was used. However, it did not have a number, only the name, but none of the houses on the same road have one. He insisted we had to have a number and asked us to choose a number, so we went with 21. That is now our official address as used on all official documents such as tax, car registrations etc.

The only numbers on the escritura are the numbers from the land registry which are not suitable for an address.

rachelk

Don't ask Correos.

Several streets in the area where I live have had their names changed as they were previously named after Francoists.

I was having a parcel delivered by Correos Express and when I got the notice to say it was at the post office to collect., it gave the address of the office as the new name of the street. I went to the post office with the delivery alert and the woman at the desk tried to send me away saying that street name didn't correspond to that office. (I knew it did, but only because of a far longer messier story involving another delivery.)

I had to insist and explain to her that the street names had changed and that Correos Express was now using the new names. She did find my parcel but I wondered how many people might have been turned away....

If Correos don't even know their own addresses, I wouldn't trust them to give you a definitive one for anywhere else.

Culebronchris

Our address is Partida such and such on the escritura and Caserío such and such on the padrón. On the Catastro we're in Pedanía such and such. What happens is that the databases used by various organisations don't, necessarily, have partida or caserío or pedanía but the database demands something so, on the NIE for instance we're in Callé such and such and Iberdrola think we're in Calle such and such, bajo. Our official postcode is 03658 but we're a pedanía of Pinoso which has the postcode 03650 so, again, depending on the database we get one or the other.

As I said this is usually no problem but to a UK organisation based in a country where a postcode often identifies an individual house the situation is almost incomprehensible.

Thanks for the replies. If the Town Hall is the absolute authority as it were then we live in Caserío such and such

Fred James

I would agree that the town hall has the final say as the Padron is the official Spanish census.

Our situation is complicated because there are no postal deliveries to the Campo so we have to pay for PO box at the local Correos office. That means that if a letter is sent to our “proper” address it doesn’t (in theory) get put in our box. Authorities such as the police and others will not accept a P.O. box so that can get complicated. However we have a very small Correos office in the village and the manager knows us well, so everything ends up in our box. Perhaps the fact that we always give him a bottle of very good wine at Xmas helps!

snikpoh

You say that Fred but our vehicles are registered to a PO box as is our residency certificate (and NIE)

Fred James

It seems to vary from region to region. It definitely wasn't an option here.

Cats-R-Us

I cannot comment on who names and numbers addresses as, when we lived in Alicante Province, it seemed to be the Town Hall and Correos combined who chose to change our street name 3 times in 10 years and then Correos came round the last time and changed all our numbers too.
Where we live now, out in the Granada campo, we have several different numbers depending on who is contacting us. The escritura says we are 37 as our cave home belonged to the local bar owner next door. When he decided to sell it was split off but we were still given 37 which is his number. The electricity was separated from his bill and they gave us number 38. The town hall said we are number 32 izquierda (on the left) and, yes, there is a 32 derecha (on the right). We don't have road names as only the main road through our part of the village is named. Our post box (correos don't deliver to homes outside of the local main village) is on the back of the chapel and was 47. At that point I did go to the town hall and query the differences but the man there just shrugged his shoulders and said it didn't matter, the correct property showed up under our name on the catastral maps on his computer. The town hall have since updated all our correos boxes as there were many unused and some being vandalised. The put up a cage round them then issued us with a key to access the area and gave us a new number - we are now 37. For couriers who can't access them we have deliveries to a local restaurant who are open 7 days a week. The last parcel to be sent there ended up coming via Correos so he didn't take it to the restaurant but put a notice in our post box to tell us to collect it from our local post office. We may not know where we live but all the locals seem to know where we are.