Six-hour queues to buy Christmas lottery tickets
Wednesday, December 10, 2014 @ 10:59 AM
SPAIN'S Christmas lottery has always been the most popular of the year, but for the first time ever record queues have been forming outside betting shops.
In most of the lottery outlets in Madrid, residents determined to end the year as millionaires - or at least a-few-thousandaires - have been waiting patiently for up to six hours to get a ticket.
The El Gordo lottery, which costs 200 euros for a full ticket or 20 euros for a tenth of a ticket, known as a décimo, is the
most prolific in terms of prizegiving - it results in more winners than any other national or international lottery in Spain, but the cash hand-outs are usually much smaller.
The top prize for a décimo can be as much as 300,000 euros, but most big prizes are five-figure sums and the majority are under 10,000 euros, or even just a few hundred.
But Christmas would not be Christmas in Spain without El Gordo, drawn on December 22, and members of the public who started to line up outside shops in the capital at 09.30hrs this week have often had to return the following day because they did not reach the check-out desk in time for lunchtime closing at 13.00hrs or 14.00hrs.
Couples with children in prams, pensioners who called their daily El Gordo queue a 'Vía Crucis' or a 'pilgrimage', saying they 'have spent more time lined up outside lottery shops than in church', and even tourists mostly say they have no intention of giving up until they get their hands on their décimo.
Read more at thinkSPAIN.com