Ola Uruguay Real Estate and Investments

In the world today, email has significantly reduced the use of regular postal systems. However, it has not totally replaced them. One of the questions asked by people thinking of moving to Uruguay is, “how’s the mail”? Well, let me tell you.

The first oddity of the mail service for us was our address. We live in a small community outside Montevideo. In Montevideo, houses have numbers. However, in most smaller centers, houses have names, not numbers.

Our house is called Casa Inspiracion. The mailman looks for the house name, usually located on a sign in the yard or painted on part of the building. But without a number, he’ll need other clues to find us. Our address also includes a numbered street, but he needs to know where on that street he should look for the house. So, in our address, we list not only the street we are located on, but also, the cross streets before and after our house. It actually works much the same as the number system with which most of us were familiar.

Another thing is we don’t have a postal code. Now postal codes are a big thing in the U.S. and Canada; you can’t get anything delivered without a postal code. But down here, in a very small country, it isn’t the same. No problem you say? Well, there are a lot of websites that you may want to order from or access online that require a postal code. Generally, the formatted processes on the net don’t allow you to skip this question. I’ve found you can most often get around the problem by entering six zeros in place of a real postal code. This also presents no delivery problems to the Uruguayan postal workers.

The other inherent questions about Uruguay mail service, are reliability and speed.

Now, more than two years after moving to Uruguay, we can assure you that the Uruguayan postal service has delivered every single known letter and parcel to us. Nothing has gone astray, which is, we might add, better than we can say about the postal service in Canada where we previously lived. So far, delivery is 100%.

However, speed of delivery is another matter. We’ve just set a new record! A person who was moving down here asked if she could mail her books and music to our home. She sent six boxes from Seattle. Five were delivered before her arrival in April. She made enquiries about the missing box. She learned nothing from either the U.S. or from Uruguayan postal service. She had given up. However, the postal systems had not. Today, more than four months after sending the mail, the missing parcel was delivered. Why? Who knows? I’ve had a Christmas letter mailed from Canada near the end of November not arrive until early February. At the other end of the scale, letters can arrive in less that a week. The fastest delivery we’ve had was a parcel containing some beaded curtains from a company in Arizona that came in an incredible three days!

The mailman does not come by every day. Not a lot of our neighbors receive much mail. When there is mail, he shows up on a motorscooter and always rings the bell by the gate and waits if there is anything too large for the mailbox. He is always friendly. He has been so very understanding during our slow acquisition of Spanish. The service feels wonderfully old-fashioned and we very much appreciate it.