Eat Twelve New Year Grapes to Welcome Good Luck / 🇪🇸 Spain

Twelve grapes welcome the coming year’s twelve months with wishes for good fortune and prosperity. Give each little fruit a place in your hopes, and greet the new year with the sound of the bells. The tradition belongs just as happily at a table with family or friends as in a festive square.

Prepare twelve grapes for each person. Fresh green grapes are familiar in Spain, and ready-prepared jars containing twelve peeled, seedless grapes have also become part of the celebration. Laying them out on small plates makes the wait for midnight feel like an occasion.

1. Before midnight, wash the grapes and prepare twelve per person in an easy-to-eat form.
2. Begin with the twelve main midnight chimes, eating a grape for each bell and welcoming the year with your wishes.
3. Share your New Year greetings and the pleasure of the twelve months ahead.

Spanish broadcasts include preliminary quarter chimes, called cuartos, before the main twelve. Listen for the main strikes to begin. Chew comfortably and keep to your own eating pace. For young children, cut grapes into quarters lengthways before serving.

Records of grapes at Spanish New Year celebrations reach back to the late nineteenth century. A major boost came with Alicante’s abundant 1909 harvest, when growers promoted grapes of good fortune. The twelve-fruit custom became firmly woven into the changing of the year.

Madrid’s Puerta del Sol is its most famous setting. People beneath the clock and people watching from home wait for the same bells. Radio and television carried that moment into households around the country, making even the small movement of taking a grape something to share across distance. There is a wonderful generosity in giving a little fruit the hope of a whole month. Put twelve on a plate, and an everyday table becomes a place to welcome an entire new year.