Doña Manolita

The beloved Doña Manolita started out selling lottery tickets in 1904 at the age of twenty-five, when she opened her booth on Calle Ancha de San Bernardo in Madrid’s district five. She sold her tickets there mostly to students from the nearby university.

She soon began to give out prizes and thus became very well known, with her clientele increasing rapidly. In 1910 there were only fifty-three lottery ticket sellers in Madrid. In 1931, it moved to the Gran Vía, which was then known as Avenida de José Antonio, and it is here where it continued until 2011, when it moved to its current location, in Calle del Carmen, 22, next to Calle Preciados.

Each Christmas, there are long queues of people from different places who come to buy lottery tickets, in what has now become a tradition.

In fact, Doña Manolita’s entire family was dedicated to the lottery, as her sister was a ticket seller as well and her husband carried the picador’s “pike”, selling tickets for the National Lottery. Doña Manolita passed away in 1951 at over seventy years of age.