All About The Spanish Christmas Lottery
Where to Buy Tickets for a Shot At Becoming One Of Over 15,000 Winners
El Gordo, or the Spanish Christmas Lottery, is in its 207th addition in 2019. With its beginnings in 1812, it boasts the largest payout in the world at 2.38 billion euros for 2018, and it promises to be even higher in 2019.
El Gordo is also the nickname of the grand prize. The prize itself is four million euros, but it is paid out to each ticket with the winning number, of which there are 170 for 2019. Therefore, El Gordo alone will pay out 680 million euros.
When Is The Big Day?
The drawing of the Spanish Christmas Lottery always takes place on December 22, and it is a long, drawn-out affair. There are two giant spheres with 100,000 balls in each. One holds numbers from 000000 to 999999; the other holds prize amounts from four million euros down to one thousand euros. For each number, one child from San Ildefonso School in Madrid will pick a ball with a number, while another child will pick a ball with the prize amount. The children will sing out their selections, bring them over to a table where the lottery observers sit, and then go back to pick the next pair of balls. It takes over three hours for all prizes to be drawn; there’s nothing else quite like it in the world.
Join The Fun and Buy Your Spanish Christmas Lottery Ticket
Around 75% of Spaniards purchase Christmas Lottery tickets. This works out to be almost 2% of the country’s entire gross domestic product. Tickets themselves are quite pricey at 200 euros, but you don’t need to buy a whole ticket to have a chance of winning. Most people get a group together and go in on a decima, or a tenth of a ticket, for 20 euros. Of course, this means winners will take home 10% of the drawn prize for that ticket. From here, tickets can be divided further into what are called participations for just two euros, or 1% of the ticket’s value.
If you’re in Spain, buying a Christmas lottery ticket is easy; there are lottery retailers scattered all over the country. One in the mountain town of Sort, which means “luck” in Catalan, sells a whopping 19% of all Christmas lottery tickets sold in Spain.
If you’re not in Spain, tickets can be purchased online. It almost goes without saying that there are scam operations that sell fake Spanish Christmas Lottery tickets, so you’ll need to be diligent to ensure that if you buy a ticket online, you’re getting the real deal.
LottoLand is a site that aggregates lotteries and scratch games from all over the EU. While they are not allowed to accept purchases from the United States where most online gambling remains illegal, interested players from other countries should have no problem securing a Spanish Christmas Lottery ticket.
buy your ticket for the 2019 Spanish Xmas Lottery at Lottoland!
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