Postcard travelled 20,000 km: Postcrossing's Longest Distance Records

Picture this: you pick up a postcard, write a few lines, stick on a stamp, and drop it in the mailbox. A perfectly ordinary thing that postcrossers do every single day, all over the world. But every once in a while, that little card sets off on a journey so extraordinary it makes you stop and think about just how vast our planet really is.

The longest postcard route in the Postcrossing project runs between Spain and New Zealand. Today we're going to dig into why it's this particular route — and not some other — that breaks distance records year after year.

Let's start with the numbers, because they're staggering

Every January the Postcrossing team publishes their statistics for the previous year. Here's what the distance records have looked like over the past few years:

Five years in a row. The same route every time. That's not a coincidence.

16 days to travel the world — is that even possible?

Postcard ES-784984 from 2024 deserves a moment of its own. Nearly 20,000 kilometres in just 16 days. That works out to over 1,200 km per day — as if the card were racing. Everything had to go perfectly: sorting, connecting flights, last-mile delivery. And apparently it did. Meanwhile, NZ-266139 covered the very same route in 99 days. That's postal mail for you — wildly unpredictable.

Same route. Six times the difference. Mail will be mail.

Why Spain and not Iceland or the UK?

This is where things get genuinely fascinating — a bit of geography that's hard not to find thrilling. The maximum possible distance between any two points on Earth's surface is roughly 20,020 km — half the length of the equator. You can only reach that distance if the two points are antipodes: locations sitting on exactly opposite ends of an imaginary axis running straight through the centre of the planet.

As it turns out, New Zealand's antipode falls right on the Iberian Peninsula — Spain and Portugal. Not a metaphor, not a coincidence. Pure geometry. Now let's look at the alternatives that might seem logical:

In other words: if New Zealand's antipode sat in the middle of the Atlantic, there would be no record at all. The geography just happens to work out perfectly.

If New Zealand's antipode were open ocean, this record simply wouldn't exist. You need land, you need people, you need postcrossers.

What about Australia?

Fair question — Australia is right next to New Zealand, so shouldn't it have similar antipodes? Not quite. Australia's antipode lands mostly in the Atlantic Ocean, with a small slice of the Iberian coast. There's some land, but not much, and it's not exactly a postcrossing hotspot. Spain and New Zealand, on the other hand, both have active communities on either end — cards genuinely get sent and genuinely arrive.

A scale that's hard to wrap your head around

And all of that is covered by a small piece of paper. With a stamp on it. In 16 days — or 99, depending on how lucky you get.

One small detail that never fails to amaze us

Postcard ES-683224 — the very first to cross the 20,000 km mark, back in 2022 — travelled from Pontevedra in the Galicia region of northern Spain all the way to Greymouth, on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island. Two small cities on opposite ends of the Earth. Two people who will almost certainly never meet. And one little postcard that connected them across half the planet in 45 days.

That's postcrossing.