Xavier Gabriel was always like a child. He was born in Sort in 1957, a small town in Lleida at the foot of the Pyrenees where some 1,200 people live and where Gabriel had very few friends and many detractors.. It is not clear if due to the eccentric character of the most famous lottery in Spain, very given to excesses, or because of the envy that his success caused in the neighborhood.

Whether for one thing or another, the neighbors always blamed Xavier Gabriel for taking advantage of the name of the town. He was the son of the town's tobacconists, studied and emigrated to the city, where he worked in banking, specifically in the now-defunct Banca Catalana, headed by the former president of the Generalitat Jordi Pujol.. After that experience he returned to the town and in 1986 he decided to open a lottery administration called Sort (luck, in Catalan)..

In those years, to maintain an open lottery administration, the Spanish State required the owner to sell at least 250,000 pesetas (1,500 euros) in a lottery and, despite the difficulties of reaching that figure in such a small town, Gabriel succeeded.. Until in 1994 he had his first stroke of luck linked, of course, to the El Niño lottery.

On January 6, 1994, the Bruixa d'Or awarded a prize of 10,000 million pesetas (60 million euros) for the first prize in the Children's Draw: 08,036. Surprisingly, several of the number buyers had returned the ticket because they had not paid it and thus the beneficiary of a large part of the prize (347 million pesetas, two million euros) was Gabriel himself who, instead of keeping it, decided to give them the money to those who had returned it. There began the legend of the famous Sort administration and its owner.

With the impulse of the first prize of the Child and the hand of his wife, Rosa Galí, Xavier Gabriel decided to turn a lottery administration where four people worked into an international business and opted to create a web page when very few people still had email. In this way, he managed to sell lottery tickets all over the world and in 2003, he already had a turnover of more than 26 million euros..

However, there began his problems with the Treasury. In 2002, the Tax Agency denounced the Bruixa d'Or before the Prosecutor's Office of the Audiencia de Lleida for an alleged crime of lottery smuggling for the sale abroad of 3.6 million euros in tickets. Gabriel sold the tickets from Andorra and through the internet and that, in those moments of birth of the digital world, seemed illegal. Finally, the Prosecutor's Office saw no crime in his actions and decided to file the complaint. That 2003 was his year of consolidation. The Golden Witch handed out 60 sets of number 42,473, the Christmas fat. A total of 240 million euros sold in tickets online that traveled to the United States, Canada, Uruguay, France, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Sort's administration began to appear in the international press and Gabriel's success went to his head. According to his own version, he became friends with Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Galactics, and bought him a ticket to travel into space on a ship that was due to take off in 2008 to test weightlessness.. I wanted to conquer the sky. The lottery was the only Spaniard with a ticket on that trip and the press did extensive media coverage of the case. That same year, Gabriel also announced the creation of Numbair Airlines, a private airline company owned by Wintuwin.. The airline never took off and the company became a real estate agency that rents out apartments in Rialp (Lleida)..

The eccentricities were not limited to space flight and in Sort he turned the lottery administration into a real fortune theme park. Gold witches everywhere and in a thousand formats for curious tourists to buy not only lottery, but souvenirs from the most famous administration in the world. Gabriel even hired a Marketing Director, and companies like Movistar, El Pozo, García Baquero, Pastas Gallo or Gas Natural (now Naturgy) fought to collaborate with him.

In 2016, the Bruixa d'Or already sold 86% of its tenths through the internet and had a turnover of more than 100 million a year. In his golden theme park full of lucky witches, Gabriel let himself be carried away by worldly pleasures and bought a red Ferrari that he parked in front of the administration gate to the envy and anger of Sort's residents.. Many times he himself dusted it, until one night someone made some scratches on the sides.

With luck increasingly elusive and fewer prizes distributed, the owner of the Bruixa d'Or returned to the front page in 2017, during the process. In an unexpected turn, Xavier Gabriel decided to take the social and fiscal headquarters of his company out of Catalonia, just as more than 3,000 Catalan companies did at that time.. In his case, he transferred it to Navarra, where tax treatment is more favorable to companies.

He argued that he was not in favor of independence (he was wrongly associated with the CUP deputy Anna Gabriel) and in an interview on Antena 3 he stated: “I will not make any more investment in my region. I have not wanted to continue investing”. He also explained that he was “against 30%” of his people, not against his people, whom he loved “as the most”. His anti-independence position was reaffirmed when he accepted the honorary position of Tabarnia, the pseudo-state created by Albert Boadella to ridicule the process.

From then on, things did not go so well for him and before the pandemic the Madrid City Council seized two properties for the tax debts he had.. The accounts sent by his group of companies to the Mercantile Registry presented losses.

At the end of 2017, he was diagnosed with colon cancer and a year later with lung cancer. La Bruixa d'Or continues to sell lottery, both on the internet and in Sort. On August 5, 2023, Xavier Gabriel died as a result of this disease.