Correos is the national postal service (the equivalent of Royal Mail in the UK). Their website can be found here:
What in theory should be a straightforward and efficient service sometimes suffers from apathy and a lack of customer service, which typically blights any business that has a monopoly. Delivery times can be like rolling a dice and stories of packages never turning up are abound.
Many residents also complain that the postman often doesn’t try to ring the doorbell and will just stick the ‘while you were out’ card in the postbox, thereby shaving a few minutes off his or her round every time. Whilst this might be less of an inconvenience in other countries, making a trip to your local Correos to collect a letter or parcel can be a day out in itself by the time you have found parking, taken a ticket, waited in the queue for an eternity and then persuaded the clerk to actually find and then hand over the letter or package to you.
Correos offers all of the typical services you would expect from a national post office, including but not limited to regular mail, recorded and special delivery, Bureaufax (content certified and tracked) document deliveries, post-boxes, sale of stamps and correspondence, banking services and money transfers.
The quickest option for more urgent deliveries is to use a private courier company (e.g. DHL, MRW or Naccex). Costs are typically higher than regular post but delivery times to many EU countries can be as quick as 48 hours (even DHL seems incapable of delivering worldwide in 24 hours from Tenerife!). A cost for an A4 envelope of documents from Tenerife to the UK on a 48 hour service typically costs in the region of €30 to €40 depending on the weight, whereas the same envelope via Correos on an urgent 3 – 4 day delivery deadline will cost closer to €15 – €20. However, bear in mind that most courier agents will come and collect the package from your apartment, villa or office, rather than you trepsing across town to park and wait in a queue at the Correos.