The El Gordo Sing-along

There was a lot of excitement regarding the Euro millions largest ever 86 million pound jackpot last week.  And sure, that’s an impressive lottery, but I don’t think anything can compare to the pomp, ceremony, tradition and downright oddness of Spain’s annual Christmas lottery – El Gordo (The Fat One).

It’s not just that it’s the biggest lottery in the world, hitting 2 billion euro last year, or the oldest (starting in 1812), for me it’s really about the sheer hysteria, complete media saturation, and best of all, the singing results, televised every year on December 22 and considered as much a part of Christmas as presents under the tree.

You read that correctly. Singing results.  School children work in teams of two to sing out the winning number while another sings out its corresponding prize amount. There are a lot of draws in this lottery.  Perhaps hundreds of 1000 euro wins, several fifth, fourth and third prize draws and then the two big first and second prize draws.  That’s a lot of singing.  There’s just the one tune.  Well I guess it’s kind of more like a cantation.  Each year, school children across the country are carefully selected and trained for this very special task, and a day of  high drama and complex number sequences which must fit snugly into a given stanza.*

It’s not easy, as you’ll see here with this little taste of the magic:

Keep watching until they get to the larger prize draw, which is met with roars of excitement and a special trip by the school children to the very serious table of auditors, not to mention a delightful repetition of the numbers.

You may note the very challenging task faced by these specially trained elite team of crack singers, of singing out a number sequence that doesn’t fit neatly into the given syllables of the stanza.

For instance, they have to sing

setenta y ocho mil, doscientos noventa y cuatro-ooooooo

(78, 294 — last year’s winning number)

in the same stanza as:

seis mil seiscientos setenta y nueve-eeeeeeeee (06679)

That’s no walk in the park. Numbers that end in a single syllable number seem to be particularly troubling.  Not for nothing do they train all year.  I’ve seen kids who can pace the syllables of the early numbers so well, you don’t even notice the one syllable final number.  That’s talent.

Every SINGLE household in Spain is tuned into this marathon singing session from the early morning on December 22.  My first Christmas season in Spain, I woke on December 22nd to the eerie yet strangely beautiful echoes of children singing, the dulcet tones surrounding and enveloping me, coming as they were from every direction.  I thought perhaps I had died and an alarmingly calming army of angels was coming to deliver me to evil.  I waited in surrender but nothing happened.  Just the continuous sound of singing, which I started to notice was just a teeny bit monotonous.  I looked out to the street to see what the excitement was, only to see it bare.  Completely bare, even by a Madrid morning’s standards (Spaniards are not early risers).  Where was everyone?  I’ll tell you where; inside, in front of the television, watching the El Gordo results.  The singing was coming, in complete surround stereo, from hundreds of neighbouring apartments and tapas bars.  It’s quite a magical auditory moment.

It’s worth noting that every year, all the grandmothers in Spain, at some point during the singing out of El Gordo, will grumble about Spain’s joining of the euro zone currency.  Heightened awareness of the mechanics of monetary economics you ask?  A healthy debate on the merits of trading zone alliances? No.  Quite simply, pesetas sounded SO MUCH better than damn euros when sung out as a cash prize amount in the annual El Gordo sing-along.  It’s all those syllables, far more musical.  And while we’re at it, don’t tell me a return to the good old fashion values of the peseta era couldn’t jump this economy out of its doldrums.

The singing presentation is usually interspersed with news footage of people shaking champagne bottles and getting drunk in reaction to winning anything from 1000 to 3 million euros or more.  Many of these people haven’t slept for several nights after travelling for miles and queuing for days at ‘lucky’ lottery outlets.  The mathematics of odds and the self fulfilling prophecy that is greater quantities of tickets from the lucky outlet making it even luckier, completely lost on many a dreamy soul.

Still, when you see the 50 year old Ecuadorian immigrant with a family of six who has been out of work for four years talking about his win, or the group of excited syndicate-winning work colleagues all calling their family and loved ones (while their manager chews his nails back at the office and starts looking up numbers for recruiters), you can’t help get caught up in the moment and congratulate people on the optimism that lead them to buy a ticket.  And it’s all set to the musical sound of children’s singing echoing through the streets.  A very special Spanish Christmas tradition.

*I have no musical education so I apologise if this is the incorrect use of the word stanza.  I picked it up somewhere and thought I’d throw it in there to make it look like I knew what I was talking about.  I think it worked. I’m hoping it worked. Did it work?

Like

Unlike