When you come upon the luckiest village in the world, all the curtains are drawn. The old man outside the bar gazes at you warily. Then he disappears inside, the door slapping shut. Is it that you're painted magenta? Is it that your rays are blinding?

You're painted magenta and your rays are blinding.

The lucky village of Sodeto, in the kingdom of Aragon, is a cluster of sensible houses spackled together off the main road, curtained behind a pine copse. The village, with its 250 inhabitants, climbs a slight incline to the church at its height, the bell tower rising in a solid bulk. Tractors clog the main thoroughfare. The earth that surrounds the village is orange and packed hard, though grass sprouts in the village square. The tranquillity is cloying, a lazy silence.

Not even the dogs work up much gumption to bark around here.

The song that the innocent children sing onstage in faraway Madrid—wearing their pleated gray skirts, slacks, and ties with blue stripes, dressed in the garb of Catholic-school students—is one that warms a Spanish heart but sounds like the creepy refrain before everyone gets offed in a slasher movie. It's the plaintive ode of two children singing in disconnected, ethereal voices. Their strangling falsettos vine up around each other, singing not about innocent things like love or country, God or glory. They sing out the numbers, as they have for the past 200 years: "Cincuenta y ocho mil, dos cientos sesenta y ocho." And then: "Cuatro millones de euros."

During this, Spain's economic apocalypse, they're singing about money, and all that it brings.

The year is 2011: The real estate and banking bubbles have burst. One out of four is out of work—5 million total—tumbled into an abyss. People march in the streets, turn hungry and hard, glinting with leaden light. Some leave the country in search of jobs. For each percent increase in unemployment comes a 1 percent increase in suicides.

In the village of Sodeto, the little school has recently been closed. There are mortgage worries, a bad harvest, and water shortages caused by less and less melted water trickling from the Pyrenees.

Everyone has trickled here, too, scatterlings drawn like filings to the magnet. Unlike other Spanish villages, Sodeto is quite young—just sixty years old and full of transplants. Sandra, the ever optimistic one, went from Blanes to London to New York to Athens, where she met a man named Costis, spent three years in an RV crisscrossing the Continent before being called here. The towering man named Fran, who lost everything in Barcelona, has come here to make himself clean with his wife and two young kids, humbling himself for any work. Ana, the Romanian who runs Sodeto's bar, arrived ten years ago to pick strawberries, but with the crisis, no one comes to the bar anymore. She has enough to eat, but with holes in her socks, not much after that.

Now a man hangs himself in Granada when they come to evict him from his home. Another spreads his arms and leaps, but rather than fly, hurtles to earth. In the village, few go to church anymore, though a group still gathers to clean it once a month, a gesture, a vestige from the past, not to be confused with faith.

El Gordo is the name given to the oldest lottery jackpot in the world—and the richest. Held every year in Madrid on December 22, the Christmas Lottery culminates with the picking of the El Gordo number, the Fat One, which, for many, has become the true Christmas miracle in Spain. In the year of our Lord, Anno Domini, 2011, the tickets bear a painting of the Virgin Mary in red and gold robes, visited by a hovering choir of angels. Joseph and Mary have traveled miles through the Judaean desert in winter—in fear of bears and boars, wearing heavy woolen robes, in the rain and cold—and now it's time for her to give birth. Unto this world will come a baby to absolve us of our sins. It's a nice story, but the lottery jackpot is 720 million euros. Seventy percent of all Spaniards play to win, spending, on average, seventy euros apiece. People visit clairvoyants and fortune-tellers, plead for the winning number.

At the appointed hour in faraway Madrid, lottery officials take their seats behind a long table on the stage of the Teatro Real. A gauntlet of media cameras fills the front row. The children appear in blue and gray. Behind them are two dramatic globes—one large, one smaller—made of golden mesh. Inside the large globe are wooden balls the size of acorns, each lasered with a five-digit number, while the smaller globe contains acorn-balls lasered with money amounts.