El Gordo Heartbreak in Madrid

The ‘Big Fat One’ (El Gordo) is one of the largest lotteries in the world and last Monday Spain celebrated a £2 billion pay-out.

Thousands of winners shared in the jackpot on Monday, including some lucky British expatriates on the costas, but in Madrid there was heartbreak.

A completely distraught widow, who gave her name as Maria-Carmen, turned up at the lottery office with the remnants of what she claimed was a winning ticket she had mistakenly put in her washing machine. “I rescued it and put it in a plastic bag that had held frozen peas,” she tearfully told Spanish television. But it was not accepted and she missed out on her 100,000 euro prize.

ONCE Kiosks

Hola! ¿Qué Tal?. Here’s a photo of an ONCE kiosk. You can find them all over the city (indeed, all over Spain) and they’re selling lottery tickets which are called Cupóns. The cash prizes are tax-exempt and range from 1.50 Euros to half a million pavos or so. There are different tickets for different days of the week, weekend tickets and seasonal grand prize draws (e.g. Primavera, Verano etc.) A live TV draw is broadcast every night on the Cuatro channel which produces a five digit number and a ‘Series Number’. To win you need to have the digits in order on your ticket plus the Series Number. Coupons are a dollar a pop and whilst the overall design stays the same there is often a different weekly theme corresponding to special promotions or current events. Collecting the different type of tickets is something of a hobby for the real aficionados.

ONCE stands for ‘Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles’, which translates as the National Organization of the Spanish Blind, and ticket sales are its main source revenue. It’s main role is as a fund raiser and provider of services for the blind and persons with serious visual impairment. It’s a powerful lobby within Spanish politics and a rich one too. It’s business arm ‘CEOSA’ employs over 40,000 blind / visually-impaired staff (many of whom run the kiosks), it runs its own media company, Servimedia, which is a ’social affairs’ news agency, and it also controls the ‘Fundación ONCE’, which supports special training and other social programmes for its members as well as having an important role in the Spanish paralympic movement. In the last few years it has come under some criticism for its perceived role in supporting the Spanish Socialist Party (PSOE) via its media interests, especially in some of the newly-created commercial television stations, and questions have been asked about some rather dodgy business investments as well. Nonetheless, it remains an important institution in Spanish life.