Spain Offers Some Of The Greatest Lottery Prizes In The World
Spain has a quite complex set of lottery games. It’s probably best known outside of Spain for the Christmas ‘El Gordo’ draw, which usually has a prize fund of over 2 billion Euros.
But Spain has other lottery games. From the big special draws to the more expected weekly games.
Those Monthly Draws
El Gordo de Navidad (the Christmas game) is just one of the big draws that Spain runs. It was the only one, until the jumbo Summer El Gordo was added. Then the crazy January El Nino draw. So there is now a big draw every month.
All the big draws use an unusual way of selecting winners. For El Gordo the balls each have a five digit number from 00000 to 84999. One ball is then drawn for each winning number, and second ball drawn from a separate machine to tie the number to a prize.
You can see a short movie of the draw here:-
Tickets are pre-printed for every possible number. Which means there is a limit to how many people can have each number. Once they are sold out, there can be no more tickets.
These are great games to play using a syndicate because buying tickets outside of Spain is not easy. And increasing your chances of winning is good too. You can join my favourite Spanish syndicate here.
Christmas El Gordo
This is the oldest of the big draws, and the most popular. It gets drawn on 22nd December every year, and Spain comes to a halt to watch the big draw. The prize fund is typically more than 2 billion Euros, with thousands of big prizes paid out. The overall odds of winning something are 1 in 7.
El Nino
This is like a ’second chance’ draw to lots of Spaniards as it gets drawn on 6th January each year. If you only win small on the Christmas El Gordo, you can just put that money straight into El Nino for another try. Odds of winning a prize with this one are 1 in 3. It’s not as popular as El Gordo but still generates a prize fund of well in excess of 800 million Euros.
El Gordo Summer
Drawn on July 6, the Summer El Gordo has a smaller but very impressive prize fund of 140 million Euros. Like El Nino the odds of winning something here are also 1 in 3.
Other Monthly Draws
There is then a big draw every other month that the other big ones do not cover. The prize fund is not as big but they still generate around 80 million Euros of prizes.
The Other Regular Draws
On top of the big draws, Spain also runs more typical lottery draws. There is the Bonolotto which is a typical 6 balls from 49 draw. this is drawn four times per week. Then there is ‘El Gordo de La Primitiva’ (not not the same as the Christmas El Gordo), where you select 5 balls from 54 plus a bonus ball. This is drawn on Sunday.
You can find out more about Spanish syndicates here.
