• Date of visit: May 9 2018, June 26 2026
• Post office visited: La Poste Andorre La Vieille, Correos Espanyols, Andorra la Vella
• Cost of sending postcard (June 2026): French Post: €2.25 worldwide. Spanish Post: €2.00 Europe; €2.10 rest of the world; €2.65 USA, Canada, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.
• Delivery time: 2018: Germany – 6 days; USA – 12 days. 2026: 5 days to UK, 2 weeks to Germany

In early May 2018, our next destination was Andorra. Reaching Europe’s sixth-smallest country isn’t quite as straightforward as flying in, because Andorra has no airport of its own. Visitors can enter Andorra either from Spain or France. We arrived from the Spanish side. After passing the 24-hour customs checkpoint at Sant Julià de Lòria, it took less than twenty minutes to reach the capital, Andorra la Vella.

I assumed our first stop would be Andorra’s main post office. Instead, I discovered something I had never encountered before: a country without its own postal service, but with two foreign ones operating side by side. How did that happen?

To answer that question, you first have to understand why Andorra exists as an independent country at all.

Wedged high in the Pyrenees between Spain and France, Andorra could easily have disappeared into one of its much larger neighbours centuries ago. Instead, in 1278, the two sides reached an unusual compromise. Rather than fighting over the tiny mountain territory, they agreed to govern it together. That arrangement survived wars, revolutions and changing borders, and remarkably still exists today. Even now, Andorra has two heads of state: the President of France and the Bishop of Urgell in Catalonia.

That shared history also explains its unusual postal system. When modern postal services arrived in the early twentieth century, neither France nor Spain wanted the other to have exclusive control. Instead of creating an Andorran postal service, both countries established their own. Spain opened its post offices in 1928, France followed in 1931, and both networks continue to operate today.

That meant we didn’t have one post office to visit, but two.

We visited both during our first trip in 2018.

However, as we returned to Andorra in June 2026, we visited both post offices again. The second visit also provides a more up-to-date picture of how the two postal services operate today.

We started at the French post office. It opens at 8:30 a.m. but only for the morning, closing at 1:30 p.m. Postal rates are exactly the same as in France. We weren’t allowed to apply the postmarks ourselves, but the clerk kindly cancelled every postcard in front of us.

A little later we walked to the Spanish post office. The prices were a little different, the opening hours were very different, and it looked as if the two offices had different ways of dealing with visitors. When we asked whether we could have our postcards hand-cancelled, the clerk looked up and simply asked, “Tourists?” After we nodded, he disappeared into a back room and returned with the date stamp, handing it to us without hesitation.

Unlike the French office, the Spanish post office stayed open until 6 p.m.

Although both postal services follow the postal rates of their respective countries, each issues its own Andorra stamps. Depending on which post office you choose, your postcard will travel with either Spanish Andorra or French Andorra stamps. Ordinary French and Spanish stamps are not valid in Andorra.

Both postal services have their own yellow letterboxes throughout Andorra la Vella. Some are marked Correos or La Poste, while others are less obvious, making it surprisingly easy to drop a postcard into the wrong one if you are not paying attention.

My American Postcrossing friend Jorge experienced exactly that during his visit in August 2025. Because it was a religious holiday, both post offices were closed. After visiting several souvenir shops, he finally managed to buy stamps at an estanco (a place where they sold cigars). He attached them to his postcard and dropped it into the mailbox outside the Spanish post office.

Only afterwards did he realise that the stamps he had bought were French.

Convinced the postcard would never arrive, he left Andorra expecting it to be lost. To his surprise, it turned up at his home a few weeks later, bearing a French postmark. Apparently, the Spanish postal workers had simply passed it on to their French colleagues.

Despite operating as two separate postal systems, the two services seem to work together whenever needed.

Andorra’s postal system is the only one I know where you can accidentally do it right by doing it wrong.

It is all for now.

I’ll be taking a short summer break, so there won’t be a new Post Office Diaries article in July. The series will return in August.

Until then, happy travels and happy Postcrossing!

If this is your first visit to Post Office Diaries, here are a few more stories you might enjoy:

• South Africa Post Office: How We Emptied a Post Box
• South Sudan Post Office: Where Mail Doesn’t Leave the Country
• Germany’s Postal Extremes: A Journey from the Deepest Mailbox to the Highest Post Office

To make sure you don’t miss future articles, you can subscribe here.