El Gordo
Spain has many different lotteries throughout the year, mostly organised by ONCE, the Spanish association for the blind. You’ll see their little cabins all around Spanish cities, where people go to buy a lottery ticket, and it’s also common for sellers to come around bars offering tickets.
The big event of the year though is the Christmas lottery - “El Gordo” the fat one, the one with the most prize money and best chance of winning (something). But wait, it’s not that simple. You don’t just go and buy a ticket (in England, last time I bought a ticket it cost £1) because they’re prohibitively expensive. Instead you buy un decimo, a tenth of a ticket, which still costs 20eur. And of course, if your ticket wins, you win a tenth of the prize money, along with the other people who bought the other 9/10s. That’s why often people band together, be it at work, or a family ticket, or a local bar. Equally though, the winners could all be complete strangers. Rather than choosing the number you want, it’s more like a raffle where the numbers are already fixed - from 00,000 to 99,999.
Ticket selling goes into overdrive at this time of year, and a wander around Sol in December will see you come across large amounts of mobile vendors with decimos tacked to their boards, calling out as if selling vegetables at a market.
Apart from the excitement of tuning into the draw on December 22nd (actually a very long and boring process), the other essential of the Christmas lottery is the tv advert that goes with it. Like the John Lewis advert in England, it’s become a staple of the season over the last few years, and conversation often turns to the success or failure of the latest one.
