Newgrange Winter Solstice Lottery

December 21, 2025: The winter solstice was at 7:03 a.m. today in our time zone (PST). The days will now be getting longer every day for the next six months!

With the winter solstice in the northern hemisphere quickly approaching, National Geographic Traveller (UK) has recently published an article “You have to win a lottery to attend this winter solstice event“. It’s all about the Neolithic site of Newgrange, older than both Stonehenge and the Pyramids. Newgrange is a famous winter solstice destination because of one of the most astonishing feats of prehistoric engineering ever constructed; at the winter solstice a light-box over the entrance is precisely aligned to let the sun’s rays illuminate 19 metres of this passage tomb for just a few brief minutes at sunrise on the solstice.

While the site may be a destination for solstice celebrations, only a few lucky folks will ever see the illumination of the passage from inside the tomb. As the title of this post says, you have to win a lottery to get inside! Only 38 winners are chosen annually from ~16,000 applicants worldwide.

Should you wish to visit Newgrange any time except at the solstice and be guaranteed to see inside the tomb, then Tourism Ireland has a great web page with visiting instructions here. That’s what we did since we didn’t fancy the 500:1 odds against winning the lottery.

Many scholars believe that Christ’s December 25th Christmas birthday may have been deliberately selected hundreds of years after his birth in order to help Christianity gain converts. The theory (hotly debated) is that setting Christ’s birthday to coincide with the Roman solstice festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Birthday of the Unconquered Sun) would appeal to pagan worshippers. No matter what one’s religious beliefs, all of us in the northern hemisphere certainly welcome the solstice and can appreciate the lovely turn of phrase of the National Geographic Traveller author celebrating:

Newgrange – a symbol of life’s victory over death as the darkest days give way to new light

Would you like to see this amazing astronomical event? Feeling lucky? Enter your name in the Newgrange Winter Solstice Lottery here:

Visit our England and Ireland Trip Page covering our visit to Newgrange.

See all of our Posts from that trip (below), or jump to the Newgrange post, complete with a YouTube video from Ireland’s National Monuments Service of the solstice illumination.