Reading An Address Floors Sides And Doorbells

An address here contains more than a street and a number. The elements after the number identify a specific door inside a building, and misreading them is why deliveries go astray.

The street number identifies the entrance

The first number is the building's door on the street, and in older areas the numbering may run in a sequence that does not alternate neatly by side.

Where a building has more than one entrance, letters follow the number, so a single structure can occupy several addresses along a frontage.

Numbers were also assigned at different times as streets were built and rebuilt, which is why sequences sometimes jump or repeat with a suffix.

The floor is written as a number with an abbreviation

After the street number comes the floor, given as an ordinal. The ground floor is counted separately and is not floor one.

That means a first-floor flat is one flight up, a second-floor flat two, and so on, which matters a great deal in buildings without lifts.

Some buildings also have an intermediate level between the ground and first floors, which appears in the address as its own designation.

The side indicator tells you which door

After the floor comes a letter or abbreviation indicating which flat on that landing: left, right, front, back, or simply a letter.

Left and right are given as seen from the stairs looking at the doors, which is the convention that most often confuses people arriving.

Where a floor has more than two flats, letters are used instead, and these are usually marked on the doors themselves.

The postcode is more precise than it looks

Portuguese postcodes have four digits, a hyphen and three more, and the extended portion narrows the location to a very small area or even a single building.

That precision means an incorrect final three digits can send a delivery to a different street entirely rather than merely to the wrong end of one.

The postcode is followed by the locality name, which is the administrative place rather than the neighbourhood people use in conversation.

The doorbell panel is the last step

Street doors usually have a panel of bells labelled by floor and side rather than by name, matching the address format exactly.

Where names appear they may be out of date, since panels are rarely relabelled when tenants change, so the floor and side is the reliable identifier.

Giving a courier the full floor and side rather than just the street number is the single change that most reduces failed deliveries.