The Spanish Christmas Lottery

The Spanish Christmas Lottery, also known as "Lotería de Navidad" or "Gordo de Navidad" is the most popular lottery in Spain. The draw of this famous lottery is held every year on December 22nd in Madrid.

The top prize is called el Gordo ("the Fat One"). As from 2011, the top prize amounts to 4 million euros for a full ticket or "billete", which means 400,000 euros for a "décimo" or tenth part of a ticket.
In fact, what players normally buy is a tenth part of a ticket, since each ticket is divided in 10 parts called "décimos".

Each 5 digit Spanish Christmas Lottery number (from 00,000 to 99,999) is issued 185 times. This means that for each number there are 193 tickets (“billete”), bearing 193 different “serie” on them.

One of the reasons why this lottery is so popular in Spain is because instead of paying just one big Spanish Christmas Lottery prize and a few other smaller prizes, it pays a considerable amount of smaller prizes.

The total amount distributed as prizes in 2024 is €2.702.000.000bn , which means € 14,000,000 per serie.