The mail carrier comes just two days a week to this Spanish village of 2,000

The mail carrier no longer comes every day: deliveries are now organized by zones and shifts

In a village of just over two thousand residents, the mail carrier only walks certain streets two days a week. In the nearest city, by contrast, recipients get their mail Monday through Friday. That asymmetry —same public company, same letter, different frequency depending on the postal code— is the starting point of a recurring complaint: someone waiting for an official document by regular mail cannot choose the channel, and the delivery calendar decides for them.

The scene is everyday and somewhat Kafkaesque. A public body announces that the item cannot be sent by email or any other means: paper and envelope only. The person watches the mailbox. A day goes by. Then two. And they discover that their street is covered only **twice a week**, while the rest of the municipality is organized into sectors with assigned days. Going to the post office to ask becomes a lottery: hitting the day when the letter is already there, before it goes out for delivery, is a matter of luck.

How many days a week Correos delivers, depending on the size of the municipality

The accounts paint an uneven map. In **Madrid**, delivery Monday to Friday. In the city of **Barcelona**, daily, though with delivery times that stretch out. In a city of more than **100,000 residents**, Monday to Friday; in another of the same size, in an outlying neighborhood, only **twice a week**. In a town of **25,000 residents**, three days: Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In one of **2,000**, two days. And in another small municipality, once every **15 days**, with letters from mid-September showing up in the mailbox long after.

The most common explanation is not a generic staffing cut but **chained substitutions**. When a mail carrier goes on sick leave, a colleague from the same office takes over their zone on top of their own. Physically, they cannot cover both on the same day, so they alternate: one day their route, the next the absent colleague's. If the absence drags on, a temporary contract may arrive, but in the meantime deliveries are spaced out. On top of that, it is claimed, there is the obligation to deliver registered mail in the afternoons under contracts of two afternoons a week.

Zone-based delivery: five days, five sectors

There is one episode that sums up the mechanism. In a city of more than **100,000 residents**, complaints about delays revealed that delivery had been split into **five zones**, with one day of the week assigned to each and letters held until the corresponding day. The internal rationale was to avoid overloading the mail cart. There were no notable consequences and the matter was filed away with a few jokes.

The practical result is that the mail carrier's frequency is no longer a constant of the service and becomes a variable of the address. Two mailboxes in the same province can have different calendars without the sender knowing. For someone waiting for an official notification with a deadline, that is no minor annoyance: it is a factor beyond their control.

What alternatives are there when the mail carrier doesn't come

The way out is limited and none of it is free. Renting a **PO box** at the office or a private mailbox solves reception, but requires travel and expense. Switching carriers is no use when the sender is a public body that requires regular postal mail. And showing up at Correos to ask about letters before delivery works by trial and error.

That leaves the extreme option raised by the person behind the complaint: moving to the city. It sounds like a quip, but it measures something real. **Depopulation** cannot be fought with fiber and remote work alone if the last administrative mile still depends on a mail carrier who comes two days a week. As long as the delivery calendar remains tied to the postal code, the question is not when the letter arrives, but how many days a week the mail carrier walks down your street.