Andorra SIM Card Guide (2026)

Every other country in this guide has an airport with a SIM counter in the arrivals hall. Andorra has neither. There is no runway anywhere in the principality, so you get here on a road, usually after three hours on a coach from Barcelona or Toulouse, and the first opportunity to buy a local SIM is a shop on a street in town that keeps ordinary retail hours. If your bus pulls into the national station at nine in the evening, or on a Sunday, you are not buying anything until the following morning. That single scheduling fact reshapes the whole question, because the moment you crossed the border your Spanish or French plan either died or started billing you by the megabyte, and the gap between the barrier and the shop counter is where the money leaks. What follows is what Andorra Telecom charges, what the shop will ask you for, and the honest arithmetic on whether the counter is worth visiting at all.

A Country With Exactly One Phone Company

Andorra Telecom is a state-owned monopoly, and it is not a soft one. The company, formally the Servei de Telecomunicacions d'Andorra and still widely called STA, is the sole licensed operator for mobile, fixed line and internet across all seven parishes. Its mobile brand is Mobiland. No rival network exists, no MVNO resells capacity, and no amount of shopping around will produce a second quote.

What that means for a visitor is subtle. The engineering is genuinely good: this was among the first countries anywhere to finish fibre to every household, and the mobile build reaches ski terrain that far larger Alpine nations still cover badly. What is missing is the price pressure. In markets with three or four carriers, tourist bundles get sharpened every season because somebody is trying to steal share. Here nobody is, so the tariffs sit where they sit, aimed mainly at the 85,000 residents rather than at the several million people who come through each year.

Andorra Telecom Prepaid Prices in Euros

The prepaid range, sold simply as Prepagament, is priced in euros and structured around residents topping up rather than tourists buying a week. Bundle names and allowances get repackaged from season to season, so treat the figures below as the shape of the market rather than a price list you can hold anyone to.

Look at what those numbers actually contain. The minutes are national minutes, meaning calls to Andorran numbers, which for a visitor is the ski school, the restaurant and essentially nothing else. The texts are a rounding error. So you are paying resident pricing for a resident product, and the part you came for, the data, is the smaller half of the value.

There is a second-order effect worth naming. Andorra's indirect tax, the IGI, runs at 4.5 percent, the lowest rate in Europe, which is the entire reason the electronics shops on Avinguda Meritxell are full of people comparing camera prices. Telecoms pricing does not follow that logic, because a monopoly has no reason to pass a tax advantage on. Cheap cameras, ordinary SIM cards.

No Airport Means No Arrivals Counter

This is the practical difference that catches people out, and it has nothing to do with price. Andorra has no commercial airport. The nearest strip that carries scheduled flights is at La Seu d'Urgell, twenty kilometres down the valley and inside Spain, which is a distinction that matters enormously to your phone and not at all to your itinerary. Everyone else arrives on wheels.

That fourth and fifth step is the gap. It is not long in absolute terms, but it covers precisely the window when you most want a map, a booking confirmation and a message to whoever is meeting you. It is also the window in which per-megabyte roaming does its worst damage, because a phone that has been asleep on the bus wakes up and syncs everything at once.

The upside, if you are staying in the capital, is that the walk is short. The bus station sits a few minutes from the Andorra Telecom shop, so a morning arrival can be sorted before lunch without a detour.

Where the Shops Are and What to Bring

Andorra la Vella. The flagship counter is on Avinguda Meritxell, the long pedestrianised shopping street that most visitors end up walking anyway, at number 112. It is the most reliably staffed point of sale in the country and the one place where an awkward request, an eSIM for an unusual handset, a plan change, a refund, will actually get resolved.

Escaldes-Engordany. Immediately upstream of the capital, effectively the same built-up strip, and the parish where Caldea sits. Convenient if your hotel is at that end rather than the Meritxell end.

La Massana and Encamp. Valley towns at the feet of the two big lift systems, Pal Arinsal above one and the Funicamp gondola out of the other. If you are based at a ski apartment rather than in the capital, these save you a trip down the CG-1.

Pas de la Casa. A small counter in the border village on the French side of the Envalira ridge, useful if you have come in from Toulouse and are staying at that end of Grandvalira rather than travelling on to the capital.

Andorran prepaid lines are registered against an identity document. For a visitor that means a passport or a national identity card handed across the counter and entered into the system while you wait. It is unremarkable and quick, typically well under a quarter of an hour when the shop is not busy, but there are consequences worth planning around.

Everybody needs their own line and their own document, so one person cannot equip a family group while the others sit with the ski bags. In practice this is the argument for one local SIM and everyone else tethering off it, or for eSIMs bought in advance for the whole party.

In peak season the queue is the real cost rather than the paperwork. The Meritxell shop in the first week of a school holiday, with the shopping crowd already on the street, is not a five-minute errand. Weigh that against the alternative, which is a profile you installed on your sofa a week earlier.

Local Prepaid Against a Travel eSIM

Read down the price column and the picture is not the one you usually get in a small country. The local product is not outrageous, and the M rate at 20 euros for 12 GB is decent value if you are staying a month. What it cannot do is compete on the two things a short-stay visitor cares about most: being live before you arrive, and not requiring a shop, a document and a queue. On pure gigabytes for a week, an eSIM is a little cheaper. On convenience it is not close. The one local-versus-travel comparison that genuinely swings on habits rather than arithmetic is unlimited data, which our Holafly review breaks down for exactly this kind of short, heavy-use trip.

Where the Line Falls for Andorra

Given the monopoly, the missing airport and the abundance of free fibre WiFi in hotels and shops, the split is fairly clean.

One caveat for the multi-country traveller. An Andorra-only product of either kind, plastic or digital, goes dark at the border in both directions, and the road back down to Barcelona is long enough that this matters. If your trip includes nights in Catalonia or the Ariege as well as the slopes, buy a regional plan that names Andorra in the country list rather than stacking two separate purchases. The Andorra eSIM guide covers which providers do that, and the eSIM Finder will size the plan once you know the shape of the trip.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I pick up an Andorran SIM the moment I arrive, the way I would at an airport?

No, and this is the thing most visitors have not thought about. There is no airport in Andorra at all, so there is no arrivals hall, no 24-hour carrier desk and no vending machine. The first point of sale is a high street shop, most reliably the Andorra Telecom counter on Avinguda Meritxell in the capital, and it keeps ordinary retail hours with a long midday break in the smaller parishes. An evening coach or a Sunday arrival means waiting until the next working morning.

What will Andorra Telecom charge me for a week of data?

Expect somewhere between 9 and 20 euros depending on which bundle you are steered towards. The smaller prepaid options sit near 9 or 10 euros for a modest allowance, and the M tariff at around 20 euros carries 12 GB plus 100 national minutes across a month. The catch is that a good chunk of what you pay for is calling minutes to Andorran numbers, which a visitor will use approximately never, so the effective cost of the data alone is higher than the sticker suggests.

Does Andorra Telecom sell eSIMs to visitors, or only physical cards?

It sells both, and it is the only company in the country that can, since it is the only network. Prepaid eSIM profiles are priced the same as the plastic equivalent. What it does not offer is a self-service purchase from your phone before you travel: you still have to present yourself at a shop with a passport or national ID card during opening hours, which removes the main advantage an eSIM usually has. If you want a profile that installs from your sofa, that is a travel provider rather than the local operator.

Why did my Spanish SIM stop working when I crossed into Andorra?

Because the crossing at La Farga de Moles is a genuine international border rather than the formality it feels like. Andorra sits outside the EU and the EEA, so the roaming rules that make a Spanish plan work in twenty-six other countries have no force here, and your operator reverts to whatever its rest-of-world tariff says. The euro in your wallet and the Catalan on the road signs both suggest otherwise, which is exactly why so many people find out from a statement a month later.

Is it worth buying a local card if I am only up for the skiing?

Rarely. A Saturday to Saturday resort week spends most of its daylight hours on a mountain where the network is the same whoever sold you the plan, and most of its evenings on hotel fibre, which in Andorra is genuinely good everywhere. That leaves a few gigabytes of real mobile use, which a travel plan covers for roughly what the small local bundle costs while also working from the moment the coach clears customs. The local card starts to make sense at a month or with a number you actually need.