WHY DO WE EAT 12 GRAPES FOR NEW YEAR EVE?

The Spanish tradition dictates that you have to eat 12 grapes with the 12 chimes of new year.
We do not know since when exactly started this tradition, for which there are different theories that originated at different dates.

What is known is that during the nineteenth century the Spanish bourgeoisie celebrated the New Year with champagne grapes and possibly a custom imported from France.

In 1896 a group of people from Madrid decided to meet in the Puerta del Sol in Madrid (where currently meeting the largest number of people in Spain to eat them and where was broadcast by radio and from 1962 by Spanish Television), to satirize the bourgeois custom  to start the year with grapes and champagne, when it is believed the popular origin.


This tradition began massively in Spain in 1909. This was due to a surplus the harvest of production in in the region of Alicante (also in Murcia and Almería), in which farmers were able to make a good marketing strategy, popularizing the bourgeois habit of eating 12 grapes of luck to celebrate the New Year.

Tradition says that whoever eats 12 grapes to the beat of the chimes will enter the new year with luck.

There is no consensus about why grapes are 12, while a majority defends it by 12 strokes, there are theories that say formerly ate one for each month of the year.


Although Spain most emblematic site, is Madrid's Puerta del Sol, although people in each city, usually gather in the town square of their locality (or some other point with an iconic clock tower).

In Valencia traditionally are eaten in the town hall square.

picture of the 12 grapes of luck & cava