How to Navigate a City Without Street Addresses
Direcciones is a short documentary about how giving directions works in Costa Rica, where “a centralized system for street addresses does not exist”. Instead, people use landmarks as reference points when giving directions. Here’s a postal worker talking about how some senders use outdated location markers to send letters:
Pretty bad, addresses here are pretty bad. For example, there is a letter I get, like, once a month. It says, “From the old Cristal Hotel…” and then some other reference points. So, yeah, it’s hard because people don’t update the addresses, they just write “from the old…” and it stays “from the old…” The Cristal Hotel had already closed when I was born.
However, for many residents there’s a kind of poetry in this old style of wayfinding. A lovely and thoughtful short film.
Comments 4
I used to live in Escazu, Costa Rica (west of San Jose) and can confirm. now I live in San Juan del Sur, NIcaragua (on the Pacific) and it is very much the same here. one place I lived here was more than half a km from the Central Park but "my address" began "del parque..."
When I lived in San José in the mid-90s, my apartment's address was "from the ICE (the state electric company's offices), 150 meters north"
I grew up in a white house that was 600 “varas” south and 100 “varas” west of “El Higuerón” (shown in the video) — varas being a unit of length, close to a yard.
Rural Montana is still like this to some extent.
One of my first jobs was at a local ISP circa 2000. At one point I was tasked with fixing customer addresses in the database because we had people with addresses like “down Old Woman’s Grave lane and a second left past the bathtub garden”.
Also Old Woman’s Grave is a real street still.
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