The announcement of the Lotería de Navidad 2026, titled Corazonada and presented under the slogan 'Sharing gives us life,' has chosen organ donation as the centerpiece of its story. The protagonist, Edu, receives a heart transplant and, some time later, meets a woman who was looking for a ticket number that her late brother had bought. When she discovers that she is the sister of the person who has allowed him to keep living, he decides to share the number with her.
The narrative uses that encounter to convey a message of solidarity, but it presents a situation that does not align with the usual operation of the Spanish organ transplant system: the identity of deceased donors and of the people who receive their organs is protected by law.
What the law says about anonymity between donor and recipient
Article 5 of Royal Decree 1723/2012 states that information that would make it possible to identify the donor and the recipient of human organs cannot be disclosed. The regulation also specifies that neither donors nor their families can know the identity of the recipient or their family, and vice versa.
This confidentiality seeks to protect the privacy of both parties and to prevent it from being directly possible to link the obtaining of an organ with the subsequent transplant. Therefore, in a donation coming from a deceased person, the family cannot know who received the organ of their loved one, nor can the recipient find out who the donor was.
That does not mean that families do not receive information about the process. The Organización Nacional de Trasplantes (ONT) considers that they may know general data about the transplants carried out and their progress, always without revealing the identity of the recipients.
How organ donation from a deceased person works
In Spain, legislation establishes presumed consent: all persons are considered potential donors unless they have expressed their opposition in life. However, the procedure includes mechanisms to respect the will of the deceased.
The ONT explains that, when a possible donor arises, the Registry of Prior Instructions or Advanced Directives is consulted to check whether they left a record of their decision. If no such statement exists, their family environment is consulted, which may communicate what the will of the deceased person was.
Moreover, not all people who die can donate organs. It is the medical team that, after carrying out the necessary tests, determines whether the clinical conditions for donation are met and which organs can be used.
Once the possibility of donating is confirmed, organs are assigned to patients who need them following medical and allocation criteria established by the transplant system. The identity of the people involved is kept protected throughout the entire process.
Are there exceptions to anonymity?
The regulations include some differences depending on the type of donation. In transplants from a living donor, for example, the donation can be carried out for a specific person in the family setting, a relative, or an intimate friend. In these cases, both parties can know each other, since the donation is directed to a specific recipient.
There is also the possibility for a person to identify publicly, freely and voluntarily, as a donor or a recipient. However, this exception does not allow the families of both parties to automatically know the identity of the other.
Anonymity, therefore, is one of the guarantees of the Spanish model of donation and transplantation. A protection that accompanies the process even when, as in the announcement for the Lotería de Navidad, the fiction sets up a meeting between two people joined by a donation.