Spanish El Niño

Loteria del Niño, also known as El Niño, is a Spanish lottery draw that takes place every year on 6^th January. Translated as the Children’s Lottery, El Niño follows a similar format to El Gordo de Navidad.

The top prize is worth €2 million for a full ticket, or €200,000 for a single share of a winning ticket. The gigantic prize pot makes it one of the largest lotteries in the world, as there are always guaranteed to be tens of thousands of winners in total.

The El Niño results for 2023/24 are shown below. View the winning numbers for the top prize categories, along with the Reintegro number. The draw took place on 6^th January 2023.

How to Play El Niño

Playing El Niño is easy. You don’t need to pick any numbers. Just decide how many tickets you want to buy and make sure to purchase them before the ticket deadline on the morning of the draw. You can even play without being a resident of Spain.

Once you have bought your tickets, wait for the draw to take place and check the results to find out if you are a winner.

How El Niño Works

El Niño works like a raffle rather than a traditional lottery. Each ticket is printed with a random five-digit number between 00000 and 99999. You can buy a ticket in full, but they are also split into tenths (called decimos) which can be purchased separately.

Five machines are used for the El Niño draw, each one containing balls numbered from 0 to 9. The draw begins with the smaller prizes, with two of the machines operating and one number randomly selected from each. The balls are reloaded back into the machine each time.

The draw progresses until all five machines are in use for the top prizes, concluding with the jackpot. A number from 0 to 9 is selected from each machine and held aloft to create the winning line.

Each set of ticket numbers from 00000 to 99999 is known as one series. The ticket numbers are printed multiple times, ensuring there are multiple winners of all the prizes. In recent years, for example, there have been 50 series, so there have been 50 top prizes of €2 million.

Prizes

There are 16 prize categories in El Niño. To win one of the top three prizes, you need to match the corresponding five-digit number exactly. There are various other ways to win too, by partially matching winning codes.

This creates more than 37,000 prizes in total and makes the odds of winning just 1 in 3. The prize pot can be worth more than €700 million. The following table shows all the ways to win, along with the payout per decimo.