How Costa Rican addresses work

Why doesn’t my hotel have a street address?

Because Costa Rica never adopted house numbering. An address here — locals call them señas, meaning something closer to “directions” than “address” — is built from three pieces: a landmark everybody local knows, a number of metres, and a compass direction.

“From the park, 200 metres south and 50 east, green house on the right.” That is a complete address. Mail arrives with it. Taxis arrive with it. There is no street name and no number because none is needed: the landmark does the work.

If you were planning to paste an address into Google Maps and drive to it, this is the thing to know before you land. What you will be given is not an address. It is a set of walking directions, and there is a code to reading them.

What does “200 metres south” actually mean?

Two blocks south. This is the single fact that unlocks everything else:

• 100 metres = one block. Always. Whether the block is 80 metres long or 130.
• 50 metres = half a block.
• 25 metres = a quarter block, meaning the corner.

Nobody is measuring. “Metres” here means blocks, counted in hundreds. If someone says “300 metres north”, you count three corners north — you do not watch the odometer.

You may occasionally hear varas instead of metres, usually from older people. It is an old unit slightly shorter than a metre, and in practice it counts the same way: a hundred varas is a block.

How am I supposed to know which way is north?

Nobody carries a compass, but everyone locally knows, because they learned it from a mountain or from the ocean. In the Central Valley the mountain range is north. On the coast, you know where the water is.

If it is not obvious, you have two perfectly respectable options: glance at your phone’s compass, or ask. Asking “which way is south?” in a corner shop will not strike anyone as strange. Asking directions is completely normal here and people answer generously and at length.

What if the landmark doesn’t exist any more?

This is where it gets genuinely funny, and you should know about it because it will happen to you.

Costa Rican addresses freeze at the moment they were invented. If the landmark was a tree and the tree came down twenty years ago, the address still says the tree. The classic example is “del higuerón” — from the fig tree — an address plenty of people still give for places where not even the stump remains.

The same goes for businesses that closed. There is an entire district of San José called la Coca-Cola, named after a bottling plant that shut decades ago. It is still called that. You will hear “where the old ICE building was”, “where the cinema used to be”, “across from what was the bank”.

To a neighbour this is not a problem: the landmark became the name of the place. To you it is, and the answer is not to guess. It is to ask.

So how do I actually get there?

Four things, in order of usefulness:

1. Ask for the location pin on WhatsApp. This is what everyone here does, Costa Ricans included. Message the place, ask them to send you the location, and a pin arrives that opens straight in your map app. Problem solved. This is one reason every listing on this site puts the owner’s WhatsApp number up front — not only for booking, but for this. Each listing also carries GPS coordinates and the written señas, so you can use whichever you prefer.
2. Waze. It is heavily used in Costa Rica and a great many businesses are registered in it by name. Searching the hotel’s name usually works better than typing an address. One caveat: if it routes you down a road that looks bad, do not follow it blindly — that is covered in the rental car guide.
3. Ask at the gas station or the corner shop. In any small town those are the two places where someone always knows. Give the name of the place rather than the directions: “where is Hotel such-and-such?” works better than reciting metres.
4. Phone them. If you are close and lost, call and describe what you can see. They will straighten you out in thirty seconds.

The words you will need

These turn up in nearly every set of directions. Worth recognising:

• A la par de / contiguo a — next door to.
• Frente a — opposite, across the street from.
• Diagonal a — kitty-corner, the opposite corner of the intersection.
• Costado norte / sur / este / oeste — which side of the square or park.
• Del cruce — from the main intersection, which in many towns is the intersection.
• La entrada de — where you turn off the highway into the town.
• La bomba — the gas station.
• La pulpería — the old-fashioned corner shop.
• La plaza — the town’s football pitch. Careful with this one: it is not a shopping centre. A mall is called el mall.
• El EBAIS — the town’s public health clinic. Pronounced “eh-BICE”, and a landmark every local knows instantly.
• El salón comunal — the village hall.
• La escuela, la iglesia, el parque — school, church, park. The three most-used landmarks in the country, because every town has all three.

What about San José, which does have numbered streets?

It has them, and almost nobody speaks in them. The centre is laid out with avenidas running east–west and calles running north–south, numbered, and that grid is genuinely useful on a map. But ask someone on the street and you will still get landmarks: “from the corner of the post office, 100 south.”

Postal codes exist too. They are for formal mail and for filling in forms, and nobody uses them to find a house.

And when I have to give my own address?

It will come up: ordering a taxi, booking a tour with pickup, having food delivered. The format that works is the one locals use.

Say the name of your hotel first, then the town, then the landmark if you have one. “I’m at Hotel such-and-such, in Sámara, opposite the school.” If you cannot remember the landmark, send the WhatsApp location pin and be done with it. And if someone is collecting you, wait outside where you can be seen — hunting for a foreigner behind an unnumbered gate wastes more time than you would think.

The short version

1. A hundred metres means one block, not a hundred metres.
2. Directions run from a known landmark, in blocks and compass points.
3. The landmark may have been gone for twenty years. This is normal.
4. The WhatsApp location pin solves every single case.
5. Asking strangers for directions is not a tourist failure here. It is the system.

If you are going to be finding places on your own, every listing under where to stay, where to eat and experiences carries the señas written the way they are said here, with coordinates alongside — precisely so both ways of arriving work without you having to pick one.