Spanish Christmas Lottery
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Spanish Christmas Lottery (Sorteo de Navidad) is a national lottery game organized every year since 1812. The name Sorteo de Navidad was used for the first time in 1892. As measured by the total prize payout, the Christmas Lottery is considered the biggest lottery worldwide. In 2005, if all of the tickets were sold, the total amount payout of prizes would be worth more than 2.023 billion Euros, which is 70% of the total revenues of ticket sales. The total amount of all prizes of the first category, called El Gordo ("the fat one") was 510 million Euros, which was distributed among 170 winning tickets (billetes) that won 3 million each.
Contents |
[edit] The ticket numbers
The Christmas Lottery is based on tickets which have 5-digit numbers, just like the regular drawing of the Spanish national lottery. Due to the enormous popularity of the game, each one of the numbers on each of the tickets is sold multiple times, in several so-called "series". Moreover, since an entire ticket (called billete) is quite expensive, the tickets are usually sold as tenths (called décimos). On a private basis, or through associations and other organizations, it is also possible to buy even smaller participations of one ticket. Usually, the price of those participations is incremented by a supplement that is paid as a donation to the intermediary organization.
The exact quantity of tickets and series, as well as their price and the exact distribution of prizes, may be different each year. For example, in 2004, there were exactly 66,000 different numbers in 195 series. In 2005, there were 85,000 numbers in 170 series. In both years, the price of an entire ticket was 200 Euros, a tenth was 20 Euros.
According to reports in the press, about 98% of all Spanish people hold at least a small participation of a lottery ticket in the Christmas Lottery each year (this includes tickets purchased or received as a gift).
Tickets may be available each year as early as August.
[edit] The drawing
Since December 18, 1812, the Christmas Lottery drawings are held according to exactly the same procedure each year. Two big spherical vessels are used. One of them contains several tenths of thousands of small wooden balls, representing all ticket numbers. The other one contains fewer wooden balls, representing the prizes to be drawn. Pupils of the San Ildefonso school in Madrid draw the numbers and corresponding prizes, singing the results aloud. Due to the sheer number of numbers and prizes, this procedure takes about 3 hours. In recent years, more than 1500 individual numbers won 1000 Euros each.
[edit] El Gordo
The climax of the drawing is the moment in which the Gordo is drawn (in 2005: 3 million Euros for each of the 170 billetes sold with the winning number). Since usually lottery outlets sell many décimos of the same number, it does often happen that entire villages or all employees of a company win more than 100,000 Euros per capita. Television reports state that this often leads to a sharp increase in local real estate price levels.
As a misconception in many non-Spanish speaking countries, it is often assumed that the term El Gordo is specific for the Christmas Lottery; some even think that El Gordo is in fact the name of the lottery. However, the real meaning of El Gordo is simply "the (fat) first prize"; other lotteries have their Gordo as well. To add to the confusion, there is a relatively new weekly Spanish lottery game called El Gordo de la Primitiva, which has nothing in common with the Christmas lottery, except the fact that it is organized by the Spanish public lottery entity Loterías y Apuestas del Estado.
[edit] Scams
The Spanish law enforcement agencies routinely issue warnings to foreign punters against buying lottery from so-called authorised dealers advertising in the foreign press. Lottery tickets should only be bought from the numerous official establishments found in every Spanish town. A décimo (tenth) ticket costs 20 Euros. If a ticket dealer asks for 25 euros or more, then something must be wrong with his or her business.
