Someone who already has gray hair still remembers that, thirty years ago, May you get the Christmas Fat Man It was practically the key to financial freedom.
With the full prize of one tenth (about 30 million pesetas in the 90s) you could buy several houses, pay mortgages and even ensure the well-being of your family with that stroke of luck. Today, with a prize of 400,000 euros (328,000 euros after taxes), that story sounds very different.
One of the main conditions is that, in the mid-nineties, the real estate market in Spain I played in another league.
Buy an apartment…or several
In cities like Madrid, a home of about 90 square meters could be found for less than 14 or 15 million pesetas, according to official statistics. That meant that Fatty Christmas allowed to buy two apartments medium-sized in a big city, or buy one, pay off the mortgage and a good pinch to maintain a good margin of liquidity.
In those years, the award was not just help: it was a complete break from financial worries. As was often heard at the doors of lottery administrations while the winners uncorked bottles of champagne, it was a prize that “kept you off work.”
Thirty years later, the prize is still striking in terms of numbers, but its real purchasing power has changed. El Gordo has been frozen at 400,000 euros per tenth for more than a decade, while the price of housing has followed an almost constant upward trajectory.
In Madrid, the average house price It ranges between 5,500 and 5,758 euros per square meter, which implies that with the 328,000 euros net of the prize, you can barely purchase 60 or 70 square meters at an average price. In practice, this means that Gordo no longer even guarantees a standard floor in many neighborhoods of the capital.
Barcelona offers a similar image. With average prices located at 3,084 euros per square meter, the Gordo de Navidad allows buy a modest home or a medium-sized apartment in peripheral areas, but it is far from the purchasing capacity it had in the nineties. The comparison leaves no room for doubt: where before the prize opened the door to buying an apartment in the city and a house on the beachtoday it is barely enough for one, and not necessarily in the best conditions.
The contrast is softened slightly if the market is viewed from more affordable cities. In capitals like Zamora or Lugo, where average prices are between 980 and 1,300 euros per square meter, El Gordo continues to allow you to buy spacious homes or even more than a small property.
However, even in these more affordable markets, the premium no longer equivalent to that massive asset leap that it represented three decades ago. The difference is not so much in the amount of the prize as in the uneven evolution of prices.
This purchasing capacity is also explained by the general price context. He housing cost It was much more aligned with the average income of the population and access to property was not subject to the housing and demand pressure that characterizes the current market. El Gordo, in that scenario, functioned as a real wealth multiplier.
A Gordo with more salary, but less power
make a salary comparison helps to better understand this change of scale. In the 90s, the average annual salary in Spain was around 2 million pesetas (about 12,000 euros). In that context, the Gordo of 30 million pesetas was equivalent to approximately 15 times the annual salary of a worker medium, which reinforced its perception as an immediate economic transformation: decades of income concentrated in a single stroke of chance.
Today, according to the latest data from the National Statistics Institute, the median salary annually in Spain is around 23,300 euros. With this reference, the current Gordo’s 328,000 euros is equivalent to just over 14 times the median annual salary. The proportion, curiously, is not that different from that of the nineties. The big difference appears when that salary multiple faces the price of housing (and all goods in general), which has grown much faster than income. That’s the key to change.
Although the premium maintains a similar relationship with salaries, your ability to buy a home has deteriorated drastically. The real estate market has become decoupled from wage growth, and El Gordo, by remaining fixed, has been trapped in the middle of that gap. What was previously enough to buy two apartments today barely covers one, and in many cases forces them to continue getting into debt, although to a lesser extent.
The social meaning of Gordo has changed. In the nineties it was synonymous with total economic independence. In 2025, it is still an extraordinary stroke of luck, but its role has shifted, no longer guaranteeing financial freedom, but financial relief.
Image | Flickr (srgpicker)
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