Why it is easy to get lost in Costa Rica

“PEOPLE REFER to a corner shop, a bar, a tree—even a tree!” exclaims Rolando Granja Enríquez, a postman. For a place with well-developed public services, Costa Rica’s addresses are a conundrum. Nearly everyone uses vague places, distances and compass directions, rather than street-names and postcodes: 200 metres west of such-and-such juice bar, 100 metres north of the house with the pink fence, and so on. Worse, sometimes the landmarks used as reference points have long gone, says Mr Enríquez.

This archaic method may be quaint and infused with local history—indeed neighbouring Nicaragua has a similar system. But it has a high economic cost, says Geovanny Campos, the head of logistics at Correos de Costa Rica, the postal service. Exactly how much is unknown: the last study, over a decade ago, estimated a toll of $720m annually.