The fat of the land
The FameWorks were in Spain just before Christmas, where all the talk was of the Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad – a special Christmas lottery draw with a potential first prize of €772 million. This first prize is known as el gordo – “the fat one.”
Many will be reading this and asking, what on earth would I do with three quarters of a billion Euros? But that would be missing the point. Because whilst the top potential prizes of the Christmas lottery are indeed astronomically fat, baked into the institution is the idea of sharing the ticket’s cost, and in turn, whatever prize is won.
One ticket costs €200 - prohibitively expensive for most. So the answer is to buy a décimo, a tenth of a ticket, for €20. And an even better answer is to buy a share of a collection of tickets. This is known as participación. Charities, workplaces, local community associations and sports clubs buy up a job lot of tickets and sell shares in the collected selection to their members. And there’s another crucial aspect: there are only 100,000 numbers (from 00000 to 99999) but 193 series of each number. Now, lottery ticket outlets tend to sell many multiples of serie, or even all of the series of a particular number. What this means is that winnings tend to be tied to specific localities, or even specific organisations within localities. Thus this Christmas, the better part of el gordo “fell” at the Distrito Olímpico Basketball club in the humble Madrid barrio of San Blas. The 700 or so club participantes took home €40, 000 each.
In media interviews with overjoyed club members, the emphasis was as much on the fun they’d had organising the participación as on the windfall they’d won. It seems that the collective comes more easily to some cultures than others. Where the British National Lottery points a big finger from the sky and asks Will you (singular) be next?, the Spanish version asks ¿Y si cae aquí? (And if it falls here?) The question implicit in the Spanish scheme is Will you (plural, your community) be next?
Media reporting on el gordo always focuses on the particular localities that have won big. This year, other big wins occurred in collectives in specific districts of Valencia and Cádiz. Whilst el gordo is of course more likely to land in big cities, where the population is denser, there are many instances of it landing in small communities, or being distributed across several... In 2011 the entire gordo of €730 million went to the two-thousand strong community of Grañén, out in the grassy wilds of Aragón. Last year the gordo was divided among several communities across the country, from the Atlantic fishing village of Porto do Son in Galicia to the dusty Andalucian market town of Villacarrillo.
Perhaps el gordo is more than just a transactional lottery, but a social institution that maps out the nation in all its cultural and geographical diversity and reminds individuals that they can be equal stakeholders in both their local and national communities. How very refreshing in our sad, atomised age!