Under a lucky Christmas star
Try your luck at the Spanish Christmas Lottery
Christmas time doesn't really start in Spain until the morning of December 22nd when the Christmas Lottery draw takes place. Boasting the biggest prize payout of any lottery worldwide, it's a country-wide event and the whole of Mallorca will be keeping an eye on it tomorrow morning.
The Spanish Christmas Lottery is the second longest continuously running lottery in the world, started in 1812 in Cádiz (Andalusia) to collect funds for the national army fighting against the French Napoleonic forces that surrounded the city. Nowadays, it takes place in Madrid every 22 December and the numbers are sung by the 'Niños de San Ildefonso', children from the 'Colegio de San Ildefonso', one of the oldest orphanages in the capital - even though since the 1990s, not all the children singing at the Christmas Lottery draw are orphans.
A whopping total of 2,310 million euros will be given away this Thursday. The lottery is based on tickets ('billetes') with five digits numbers which are divided into ten 'décimos' costing twenty euros each. The largest prize is called 'El Gordo' (The Fat), which grants 400,000 euros for each 'décimo', and there are also second (125,000€), third (50,000€), fourth (20,000€) and fifth (6,000€) prizes.
The whole country purchases décimos, with long queues of people waiting to buy tickets at some of the most famous lottery kiosks such as 'Doña Manolita' in Madrid where the waiting time sometimes reaches eight hours. It all then comes to the moment when one of the San Ildefonso kids sings the Gordo, champagne bottles are popped and the party moves to the shop where the number was sold.
So, if you're spending Christmas in Mallorca, head to the nearest lottery kiosk, buy a 'décimo de Lotería de Navidad' and partake in one of Spain's oldest festive traditions.
