What, already?! Customers queue for Christmas lottery at Spain's 'luckiest' ticket shop

WE HAVEN'T even packed away our flip-flops and beach towels yet, and already some people in Spain are thinking of Santa Claus – or, at least, the three days before his arrival and the possibility of an early, very lucrative present.

Although several lotteries, national and continental, take place daily and weekly in Spain, the most famous and eagerly-awaited of all is the El Gordo ('fat') draw, held without fail on December 22, even when this is a Sunday.

But for those who like to buy a full ticket to up their odds, at a cost of €200, or even a décimo or tenth of a ticket – the usual method – at €20, in the run-up to the festive season, most average earners try to spend as little as possible on absolutely everything in the month of December, given how Christmas tends to clear them out.

To that end, El Gordo tickets start being sold in summer – which is also a chance to get the number combination you want, if you have a specific one in mind – even though the hype and TV advertising does not start until well after the first few chocolates are eaten from the Advent calendar.

One of the reasons that the El Gordo is so popular is that, although the prizes are much smaller than, for example, the Euromillions (a winning décimo gets you €400,000, then you have to pay tax on everything over the first €10,000 at a rate of 20%), there are many more of them, and shared between an absolute maximum of 47.1 million people.

That's the population of Spain, but assuming not everyone with children under 18 buys one for their kids as well as themselves, and even taking into account foreign tourists who have heard about it and decided to take part, the odds are actually much higher. 

Still not terribly high, but better than the estimated one in 114 million chance of hitting a ginormous jackpot in the much bigger lotteries in Spain and Europe.

This makes it even stranger how two lottery shops, and one other town, have a long-running and consistent record for the greatest number of wins since their opening.

Preparing early for Christmas...against the odds

The Girona-province town of Sort – a name which is catalán for 'Luck', or which in Castilian Spanish would be Suerte – regularly shifts high-prized tickets, as does the lottery sale point in Manises, the nearest town to Valencia airport, and the one in Madrid founded 113 years ago by a lady known universally as Doña Manolita has sold a top-five prize every year without fail.

Of course, given that the balls which fall out on live TV on December 22 all weigh the same and there's an equal number of every ball numbered 0 to 9, there is no way you can really increase your odds of a win, no matter where you buy a ticket or which of the five-digit combinations (from 00.000 to 99.999) you buy.

But the 'luck' associated with Sort, Manises and Doña Manolita's place is a self-fulfilling prophecy: Their international reputation for selling prizewinning tickets means those tickets they do sell are in high demand from summer through to the early hours of December 22; the sheer volume they shift means that, according to the law of averages, at least one is going to be in the top five.

Below the €400,000 for a winning décimo, the tenths of a ticket drawn between second and fifth are worth €125,000; €50,000; €20,000 and €6,000 (multiply these figures by 10 for a full, €200 ticket), the fifth-prize ticket is not just one number, but eight separate combinations, and a series of much smaller ones, of around €100 or €50, and 'refunds' of €20, are also pulled out of the hat, or roll out of the glass cement-mixer-thing on telly.

But humans are, by nature, superstitious; even if you're not, you probably still avoid walking under ladders since you realise that not being superstitious is no guarantee you won't get bad luck from doing so (or a pot of paint landing on your head), meaning Sort, Manises and Doña Manolita's shop will always attract massive numbers of buyers, even though the odds of a win are the same in these places as anywhere else.

Ticket-buyers have been around the block this summer

This week, reporters in Madrid have revealed that to get a ticket from Doña Manolita's, customers are already having to queue.

Long strings of people are spotted throughout the day, stretching all along the street and round the next corner, says a leading news agency.

And even allowing for the fact that, due to anti-Covid protocol, the queuers are standing two metres apart, the numbers of would-be El Gordo buyers are constant throughout the whole of Doña Manolita's opening hours and consistently large.

Reporters say they have seen tourists – foreign and Spanish – noticing the queue, asking what it's all about, and opting to join it on the spur to see if they, too, can cash in on Doña Manolita's reputed Midas touch.

Others, though, have been seen heading specifically to the shop and, deciding life is too short to stand around on the pavement all day, have turned around and left.

But that's not to say they won't buy their décimos online instead.

The 2020 jackpot number was 72.897, and very widely spread across the country – but not in Sort or Manises.

Doña Manolita did, however, sell the first-prize combination.

If you, too, want to join the quest for a Doña Manolita ticket before December 22, you'll find the shop on Madrid's C/ del Carmen at – spookily enough – number 22.

Maybe that's its secret.