Juan Carlos Zalazar sold a lottery ticket that won €1.235 million in local lottery prizes along his usual Torre del Mar route, including one €500,000 jackpot and 21 prizes of €35,000.

Torre del Mar ONCE seller delivers €1.235 million

Zalazar sold 22 winning coupons during his Thursday, September 24 route around Torre del Mar. The winning number was 35972, with series 044 taking the top €500,000 prize.

Zalazar has worked as an ONCE seller since 2022 and does not have a fixed sales point. His winning tickets went to customers he knows from his daily rounds, spreading the money among several familiar faces in the Axarquia town. Born in Bolivia, Zalazar has lived in Spain for 20 years.

Lottery windfall arrives on wedding anniversary

An extra twist came on the same day as Zalazar’s 15th wedding anniversary. His wife is from Torre del Mar, and he joked that the payout had given them a reason to extend their celebrations.

“I’m very happy to have been able to give so much luck to my customers, who are there every day,” he said.

Some winners needed convincing before celebrating. Zalazar said one customer was doubtful because the previous day’s winning number had also ended in two. Friday brought no day off for the lucky seller. He was back on his route as usual.

How much does the ONCE Cupón Diario pay?

The Cupón Diario is drawn from Monday to Thursday. The main prize is €500,000 for matching all five numbers and the series, while 49 coupons matching the five numbers win €35,000.

Thursday’s coupon was dedicated to sport and the UN Sustainable Development Goals, carrying the message ‘Sport for sustainable development’.

The Torre del Mar payout comes less than two weeks after another ONCE windfall in the Axarquia area. On September 13, seller Francisco Lucia sold a Sueldazo in Torrox Costa worth €2,000 a month for ten years, or €240,000 in total.

ONCE uses income from its lottery products to fund programmes and services for people who are blind or have severe visual disabilities. The organisation also provides employment opportunities for thousands of people with disabilities, with its network of more than 21,400 sellers playing a central role in distributing its lottery products across Spain.

Ask a Spanish care home whether it has a personalised care plan for your relative and the answer is almost certainly yes. Ask whether that plan means they choose their own bedtime and, according to new figures, there’s a good chance it doesn’t. 

Nine in 10 care homes say they have a personal plan

Spain has published its second full count of residential care centres, and for the first time it used the same standard everywhere rather than letting each region measure things its own way. The Ministry of Social Rights, Consumo y Agenda 2030 (Spain’s social affairs ministry), through Imserso (the Institute for the Elderly and Social Services), counted 7,893 centres between homes for older people and homes for people with disabilities, and asked every one of them how they run day to day.

Nine in 10 said they had a personalised care plan for each resident. On paper, that sounds like exactly the individual attention families hope for when they choose a home. In practice, according to the same figures, it doesn’t always stretch as far as when someone goes to bed. 

Just under half let residents choose their bedtime

Only 46.9 per cent of centres said residents could decide for themselves when to go to bed and get up. In the rest, that call is made for the whole home rather than left to the individual, whatever their own habits might be.

It’s an easy detail to overlook when weighing up a care home, where the assumption is usually ‘of course you’d still get to live by your own routine, just with more support around you’. These figures suggest that isn’t always the case, and the gap between having a written plan and actually letting someone choose their own hours is exactly where families’ expectations and reality can part ways. 

It’s worth being clear what the census measures, too. The figures come from centres describing their own policies, not from residents describing what their days are really like, so a home that ticks the box for flexibility on paper could still fall short of it in practice. Officials have also said this second count isn’t directly comparable with the first from 2024, since both the methodology and the centres included have changed.

Restraints, pets and shared rooms tell a similar story

The rest of the census paints a similar picture of a sector still working towards full personal choice rather than delivering it everywhere. Three in four centres say they have a plan to phase out physical or mechanical restraints, and just over half allow residents to keep a pet, though that figure drops sharply in publicly run centres compared with private ones.

Fewer than half of residents have a room to themselves, with shared bedrooms still the norm across both elderly and disability centres. Ownership matters too, with nearly two in three elderly residences privately owned and run, and the rest split between public ownership and centres that are publicly owned but privately managed. 

The census follows a bigger shift in how Spain cares for elderly people 

This count lands only a week after Congress approved Spain’s biggest overhaul of dependency and disability law in 20 years, a reform aimed squarely at people cared for at home rather than in residential settings. That law lets home carers accompany someone to appointments, combines previously separate services and allows friends or neighbours to be paid as informal carers, but it says nothing about what happens once someone actually moves into a home.

Rosa Martínez, Spain’s Secretary of State for Social Rights, said the point of the census wasn’t to grade individual homes but to finally see the sector clearly. “You cannot transform what you do not know,” she said, arguing that a shared national standard was overdue after years of each region measuring what it could, however it could.

What to ask before choosing a home

There’s no way to check a specific home’s real routine from a national spreadsheet, so the most reliable option is still to ask directly, and specifically, rather than accepting a general reassurance about “personalised care”.

The questions that are most important to ask before signing anything:

• Do residents choose their own bedtime and wake-up time, or does the home run one fixed schedule for everyone?
• Does that answer change for residents who need more support, or who share a room?
• How often and when are visits allowed, and does that change at short notice? 
• Can residents keep their own belongings, furniture or a pet in their room?
• How is a personalised care plan actually put into daily practice, rather than just written down?

A written care plan is a start, not proof, so the safest way to know how a home really runs is still to ask before signing anything, not after a relative has already moved in.

See also: Families caring for elderly parents in Spain say Brexit has left them with impossible choices and Understanding live-in home care, for families weighing up alternatives to residential care.

A single mother in Benalmadena and homeowner says she is facing homelessness after she rented out her apartment temporarily and the occupants promptly ceased paying rent. The legal eviction of tenants, who it is said have not paid rent for nine months, was postponed by the courts at the last minute.

Named only A for privacy reasons, a foreign resident and single mother, says she had expected to return to her Torrequebrada apartment on Thursday, September 24, after a court had scheduled the eviction process of the occupants for 10.30am. Instead, she says the proceedings were postponed after the defendants claimed just two days before the hearing that they did not have legal representation.

She says she now has no idea where she and her child will live, while her child has been unable to start school as planned.

Nine months without rent in Benalmadena

According to A, the tenants moved into the Benalmadena property in September 2025 and haven’t paid rent since December. She told EWN they sent an official letter in March asking her to stop “bothering them” to ask for the unpaid rent.

She believes the temporary tenants understood the legal process from the start. Months of legal proceedings followed, with A continuing to pay property-related bills for utilities used by the occupants while receiving no rental income from them whatsoever. That is her allegation, and the tenants’ account has not been provided to Euro Weekly News.

She says the financial pressure has also been increased by lawyer and other legal costs involved in trying to simply recover her own home.

Eviction delayed after legal representation claim

A court decree dated July 31, 2026 states that the defendants had been served and that an eviction had been scheduled for September 24. She says the occupants received the court order but waited until shortly before the deadline to raise their latest objection. She explains the occupants, business owners in Benalmadena, then claimed to be in a vulnerable economic situation and that the court now has to consider the new evidence. But, no one knows when that will be resolved. No new eviction date is known to A. Her life has been left dangling ever since.

Spain’s vulnerability rules

Spanish law currently allows certain vulnerable tenants facing eviction over unpaid rent to ask the court for an extraordinary suspension where they can demonstrate economic vulnerability and a lack of alternative housing.

Under Royal Decree-Law 2/2026, these measures apply until December 31, 2026, but the law also includes an important protection for landlords who own two or fewer homes. In such cases, the suspension described in the measure does not apply. The judge has to consider the new evidence and the relevant legal conditions before deciding whether a suspension is justified.

A says she is a single mother facing her own housing uncertainty. She had expected to move back into the apartment once the temporary tenants left. Her child has been staying in another house until now, but that arrangement is coming to an end.

‘I don’t know what to do with my life’ she says the dispute has gone far beyond the unpaid rent. “I don’t even know what to do with my life now, where I will be living or when and where my child will go to school,” she said.

She told Euro Weekly News that she had trusted the Spanish family who rented her apartment and believed they were honest tenants. She is not asking for the court to be bypassed. She wants attention drawn to her position as a homeowner who says she has followed the legal process while going without rental income for nine months. “I am talking about what happens to an ordinary mother and child when a property dispute leaves a family without a home, without school arrangements and under severe financial pressure — despite having gone through the legal process.”

The case is now waiting to be dealt with by the courts, which is considering the occupants’ claim and new, last-minute evidence.

Until the written decision is received, it is not known when proceedings will move forward or when A can return to her Benalmadena home.