Lucky Champ: Spanish seaside town rakes in €600m from El Gordo lottery

It is Spain’s annual Christmas lottery, also known as El Gordo (The Fat One) because of the amount of money which is distributed in prizes as opposed to being kept by the Spanish state.

The top prize for this year’s win is being capped at R6.5 million, with the remain part of the honeypot allowed for multiple draws and thousands of winners. “Nearly everyone in Spain buys one or more tickets for “El Gordo” Spanish Christmas lottery with an average cost of 70 euros per person”.

The winning numbers for the country’s “el Gordo” jackpot – worth $2.4 billion this year – were revealed, followed by a contingent of winners stepping forward to claim their prize.

The top winning number is usually sold in a number of different agencies, but went this time to just one in the southern beach town of Roquetas de Mar, where elated winners arrived and cracked open bottles of sparkling wine for a celebratory street party.

Mayor Gabriel Amat told a local newspaper that he’s thrilled about the impact the massive lottery win will have on his town.

El Gordo creates something of a frenzy each year in Spain, with long lines, sometimes hundreds of people deep, forming around ticket retailers weeks before the draw. “It’s very important for the town, especially in the hard times we’ve been facing”. Lottery officials say that can happen because bettors don’t pick their own numbers.

“I feel a great joy, mainly because it’s so well spread out, especially among workers”, he said.

The Gordo lottery first took place in Cádiz in 1812 and has not missed a year since, even continuing through Spain’s civil war between 1936 and 1939.

“The El Gordo lottery pays out more lottery prizes than any other lottery draw in the world, which is why the Spanish Christmas lottery is the biggest lottery payout in the world”.

The prize ticket numbers are sung out by pupils of Madrid’s Saint Ildefonso School in a nationally televised event from the city’s Teatro Real opera house.