Why Play?

There are so many amazing features to the Christmas Lottery. With jackpot odds approximately an amazing 1/100,000, overall estimated odds an even more amazing 1/7, at least 70% of ticket sales contributing to the prize pool of over €2 billion, and an estimated mind-boggling total number of prizes pushing 2.5 million, you can’t miss out on the biggest event of the holiday season—El Gordo!

Format

El Gordo is the largest of three annual Sorteo Extraordinario raffles in Spain and they all have similar draw formats and ticket-allocation methods. Raffle tickets (billetes) each contain a five-digit number. Each billete is printed multiple times in their own series (serie) due to the popularity of the raffle; the amount of serie produced varies year to year. Identical billetes will each have their own unique serie number. A décima is the equivalent of a tenth of a billete and can be purchased individually in exchange for a tenth of the prize amount. The product of serie and billete/décimas represent the grand total of shares at stake.

Each five-letter number and each prize value are laser printed on balls and placed respectively into two spherical drums (bombos), from where they are drawn to match a number with a prize. The raffle begins with La Pedrea prizes. Pedrea roughly translates to “stoning” or “avalanche” but here it refers to a “shower,” as in a “shower of prizes,” or less contextually, an “avalanche of pebbles.” La Pedrea symbolizes all of the secondary prizes before the raffle moves on to its jackpot, El Gordo!

History

With such a distinctive flavour of course comes a storied history and a very unique format. Formally called, since 1892, the Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad (“Extraordinary Christmas Draw”) or the Lotería de Navidad (“Christmas Lottery”) for short, the lottery as a whole borrows its colloquial name, El Gordo (“The Big One” or “The Fat One”), from the nickname of its jackpot prize.

Its inaugural draw occurred in 1812 in the city of Cadiz; it shifted to Madrid two years later where it has stayed ever since. The winning numbers were sung aloud by students at the Colegio de Educación Infantil y Primaria San Ildefonso. The school primarily functioned as an orphanage in the 19th century, and it was believed that, as orphans, the children would be less susceptible to bribes or cheats in announcing the raffle results. And although a regular school now, for tradition its students still sing El Gordo numbers to this day.