¿Entre Qué Calles? How Mexican Addresses Actually Work

A courier called me about a package and asked a question I had never heard in my life: ¿entre qué calles? I read him the street and the number again, slowly, as if the problem had been my diction. He waited. Then he asked again, patiently, the way you talk to someone standing in the wrong country.

That was not impatience on his end. He was asking the most useful question in Mexican delivery, and I had no idea it was a question I was supposed to be able to answer.

A Mexican address is six parts in a fixed order: street and number, unit, colonia, alcaldía or municipio, código postal, then city and state. Leave out the colonia and your package can go, correctly and legally, to a street with the same name on the other side of town.

The address is not one string. It is a funnel, and every line narrows the search - including two lines no form will ever ask you for.

The anatomy of a Mexican address

Here is the whole thing, top to bottom, in the order forms and people expect it.

Written out on one line, it looks like this: Orizaba 84, Int. 302, Col. Roma Norte, Cuauhtémoc, C.P. 06700, Ciudad de México.

Every line does a job. The street gets you to a name. The colonia tells you which of the several streets with that name. The código postal confirms the colonia. The alcaldía tells the sorting center which chunk of the city.

You will also meet these abbreviations constantly, mostly on forms that give you nine characters of space:

Número exterior vs número interior

Exterior is outside. Interior is inside. That is the whole logic, and it survives contact with reality better than most things in this post.

The número exterior is painted on the street door of the building. The número interior is your apartment, your office, your studio at the back of the courtyard.

• Es Orizaba ochenta y cuatro, interior trescientos dos.
  It's Orizaba 84, unit 302.
• El exterior es el 84, el interior es el 302.
  The street number is 84, the unit is 302.

If you skip the interior, the package reaches the building and stops there. Sometimes a neighbor signs. Sometimes it goes back. Sometimes it becomes a story you tell later.

Some buildings use letters instead: interior A, depto. 4B, casa 3. All fine. Write whatever is actually on your door, not what you think sounds more official.

The colonia is load-bearing

In Mexico, colonia is the everyday word for a city neighborhood, and the dictionaries list exactly that sense: each of the urban zones that grew up around the center of a city.¹²

It is also the line foreigners delete first, because it looks decorative next to a postal code. It is not decorative. It is the line that makes the rest of the address mean one specific place.

Here is why. The national statistical catalogue of place codes covers state, municipio, and locality.³ The colonia layer sits on top of that as a separate settlement layer that has to be delimited on purpose, using blocks and street lines, because it is not a clean administrative unit in the first place.⁴ In Mexico City, the working catalogue of colonias published as open data comes from the electoral institute rather than from one single address authority.⁵

Translated out of institution language: nobody ever ran a national committee to stop two streets from sharing a name.

So Mexico City has more than one Calle Morelos. More than one Avenida Juárez. More than one 5 de Mayo, several Independencias, and a truly heroic number of streets named after the same handful of national heroes. They are not duplicates by mistake. They are in different colonias, and the colonia is the thing that keeps them apart.

Write Calle Morelos 120, Ciudad de México and you have described dozens of front doors. Write Calle Morelos 120, Col. Del Carmen and you have described one.

Alcaldía, delegación, municipio

These three confuse people because they are all the same slot in the address, filled by whichever word the local system uses.

Outside Mexico City, that line is the municipio - the municipality. Inside Mexico City, it is the alcaldía, one of the city’s 16 territorial demarcations, whose boundaries are published as municipal-level geostatistical areas.⁶ The current legal framework for them is the Ley Orgánica de Alcaldías de la Ciudad de México.⁷

Until the city’s political reform, those 16 were called delegaciones. The name changed. Half the city did not.

You will hear both, and older forms still print Delegación as the field label. Nobody will correct you either way. Coyoacán is Coyoacán.

And a small trap worth knowing: colonia and alcaldía are different levels. Roma Norte is a colonia. Cuauhtémoc is the alcaldía that contains it, along with a few dozen others. Writing one where the other belongs is the most common way an otherwise perfect address goes soft.

Código postal: five digits, one colonia

The código postal is five digits. The national lookup published by Correos de México walks you down state, then municipio, then settlement, and hands back the code for that specific colonia.⁸

Which means the postal code and the colonia are two ways of saying the same thing, and you write both anyway. One is for humans and one is for sorting machines.

• ¿Cuál es tu código postal?
  What's your postal code?
• Cero seis siete cero cero.
  Zero six seven zero zero.

Say the digits one at a time. Do not say “six thousand seven hundred.” Nobody does that and it makes the other person start over.

¿Entre qué calles? The field no form has

This is the question. Every courier, every gas delivery, every water truck, every furniture guy. ¿Entre qué calles? means: between which two streets does your building sit.

Drivers do not navigate by number. They navigate by cross street, then scan the block for the number. Give them the two cross streets and you cut the search from a street to about forty meters of it.

• Entre Colima y Tabasco.
  Between Colima and Tabasco.
• Casi esquina con Tabasco.
  Almost at the corner of Tabasco.
• Es la cuadra entre Colima y Tabasco, del lado de los números pares.
  It's the block between Colima and Tabasco, on the even-numbered side.

No online form on earth has a field for this. Which is why you should find your two cross streets once, today, and keep them saved somewhere you can read them while a stranger waits on the phone.

It is the one piece of information that turns every delivery from a phone negotiation into a knock on the door.

If a delivery form gives you a free-text box labelled referencias or indicaciones, that box is where the cross streets go. That box is doing more work than the rest of the form.

Referencias: the landmark is part of the address

A referencia is, plainly, a reference point.⁹ In Mexican daily life it means the visible thing near your door: a color, a shop, a tree, a church, a sign.

In a lot of countries this would be considered charmingly informal. Here it is just part of the address, and leaving it out is the informal choice.

• La referencia es un portón verde, junto a la tintorería.
  The landmark is a green gate, next to the dry cleaner's.
• Frente al parque, arriba de la panadería.
  Across from the park, above the bakery.
• Es el edificio gris de cuatro pisos, el único con toldo.
  It's the gray four-story building, the only one with an awning.

Good referencias are things that do not move and can be seen from a scooter at speed. A parked car is not a referencia. A green gate is.

S/N and the addresses that break forms

S/N is sin número: the building has no assigned street number. It is common in small towns, on rural roads, in newer developments, and on the odd stubborn CDMX corner.

It is a legitimate address. It also means the rest of the line has to carry the weight, so a strong referencia stops being optional.

Two more form traps worth naming. Some online checkouts give you one address line and no colonia field, usually because the form was built for another country. Put the colonia in the second address line, or at the end of the first one. Do not just drop it.

And when a form asks for “State”, Ciudad de México is both the city and the state. You write it twice and it looks wrong and it is correct.

How to dictate your address on the phone

The person on the other end is writing it down by hand, on a screen, or into a headset in traffic. Give it in the order they expect, in short chunks, with a pause after each one.

• Orizaba ochenta y cuatro... interior trescientos dos... colonia Roma Norte... alcaldía Cuauhtémoc... código postal cero seis siete cero cero.
  Orizaba 84... unit 302... Roma Norte neighborhood... Cuauhtémoc borough... postal code 06700.
• Está entre Colima y Tabasco. La referencia es un portón verde.
  It's between Colima and Tabasco. The landmark is a green gate.

Then the two phrases that save the call:

• ¿Se lo repito?
  Shall I repeat it?
• Le deletreo la calle: o, ere, i, zeta, a, be, a.
  Let me spell the street for you: O, R, I, Z, A, B, A.

When they confirm, sale or va is the whole reply. And if they say ahorita llego, read our note on ahorita before you plan the rest of your afternoon.

The version to save in your phone

Write your address out once, in full, in the order above, with the cross streets and a landmark at the end. Keep it in a note. Paste it into forms, read it on calls, send it on WhatsApp.

Something like this:

• Orizaba 84, Int. 302, Col. Roma Norte, Alcaldía Cuauhtémoc, C.P. 06700, Ciudad de México. Entre Colima y Tabasco. Portón verde, junto a la tintorería.
  Orizaba 84, unit 302, Roma Norte, Cuauhtémoc borough, postal code 06700, Mexico City. Between Colima and Tabasco. Green gate, next to the dry cleaner's.

That last sentence is not extra. That last sentence is the address.