How many times has Spain won the Eurovision Song Contest?

How to get close to this number

Divide editions by winners. The contest has run for around seventy years with one winner each, spread across some fifty participating countries — so the average country wins once or twice in the contest's entire history. A mid-table country landing at the low end of that is the expected answer.

The clustering is the notable part: both wins came in consecutive years, and neither before nor since. Contest success is far more autocorrelated than random, because a winning formula, a confident broadcaster and a favourable voting climate all persist for a year or two and then fade.

The four-way tie in 1969 is the genuine oddity worth knowing: the only time in the contest's history that four countries shared the win. There was no tie-break rule at the time, and the rules were rewritten afterwards — a good example of a scoring system being patched only after an outcome nobody had planned for.