El Gordo | Spain's Traditional Lottery Game

The El Gordo (The Fat One) Christmas lottery is the most time-honoured lotto draw in Spain with the vast percentage of the country’s population partaking. Believe it or not, this draw has turned out to be a national activity with 98% of Spain’s citizens taking part. This is not really remarkable when you consider that the El Gordo lottery is the largest prize fund lotto game in the world.

The typical Spanish citizen spends around €73 in the Christmas draw and in 2008 the prize fund was approximately €2.20 billion. Here are a number of key features of the El Gordo lottery:

• More than 13,000 prizes are paid out.
• It is operated by the Spanish Government.
• There is an excellent 1 in 6 probability of grabbing a cash prize.
• All prizes are paid out straight away and are tax exempt for Spanish citizens.
• 70% of the revenue generated by ticket sales is paid out in prize money.

Ever since December 1812 the Christmas lottery has operated in precisely the same manner year on year. Two large sphere-shaped containers are used; one of them contains tens of thousands of small wooden balls representing all ticket numbers; the other one contains fewer wooden balls representing the prizes to be drawn. In the Lotería Nacional hall in Madrid, students of the San Ildefonso School draw the numbers and corresponding prizes, singing the results out loud in front of the public while both Spanish national television and radio broadcast the event.

Due to the vast quantity of numbers and prizes, this procedure takes around three hours. In recent years, in excess of 4,800 individual numbers have collected no less than €1,000 per billete (€100 per décimo) in the Christmas draw. The individuals who are not lucky enough to grab one of the many prizes frequently come out with the typical comment that "it's health that really matters". Participants who just win their entry fee back will regularly re-invest the winnings in a ticket for El Niño, the second most influential draw, held on the 6th of January each year.

The two vessel system is the time-honoured method of drawing the numbers in Spanish lotteries but this system is now kept exclusively for the famous Christmas draw. The rest of the weekly draws as well as the five other yearly El Gordo draws use five containers with 10 balls in each, from where the winning numbers are pulled out.

Lotto shops in Spain mostly only sell tickets for one or two numbers, so the winners of the largest prizes often live in the same town or region or work for the same company. In 2005, the winning number was sold in the town of Vic in Catalonia (population 37,825), whose residents shared approximately €500 million.

Historically, you could only participate in the El Gordo if you were a Spanish citizen. However, with the introduction of lottery ticket sales agents you are now able to take part in this world famous Spanish national lottery regardless of where you reside in the world. Some international El Gordo syndicates have also been set up to not only allow more people access to this lottery but to boost their probability of collecting cash prizes also.