Spanish lottery to pay out $2.4 billion

Winners hold a lottery ticket showing the first prize winning number, 79140, of Spain’s Christmas Lottery “El Gordo” (The Fat One) as they celebrate in Villanueva de la Concepcion, near Malaga, Spain.

Barcelona Yellow, a travel website in Spain states that “The biggest winning ticket of the “el Gordo” Spanish Christmas is usually worth about 3 million euros in total, but what makes the Spanish Christmas lottery the biggest in the world, is that there are many winning numbers with prizes of smaller amounts”.

Feeling jealous? Well, you shouldn’t because you can play the next one (which takes place in a year’s time), even if you’re not from Spain.

Unlike many other lotteries, there is no single jackpot in El Gordo.

The lottery has taken on special importance in recent years as Spain struggled through a real estate bubble and the European debt crisis.

This year’s biggest victor of the top prize, known as El Gordo, or The Fat One, is in the coastal tourist town of Roquetas de Mar, in the southern region of Almeria, where a group of residents will now share out a 4-million-euro prize.

“Nearly everyone has a ticket, or a share in one”, Laujar de Andarax mayor Almudena Morales told Spain’s Europa Press news agency.

“They went to workers who need it a lot”, she said “And to top it off, they were distributed by the kids”.

To buy a whole ticket and thus have a chance of winning €4 million costs €200, hence many people’s preference for a €20 décimo, or tenth of a ticket.

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

Winners from across the country flocked to local retail outlets to toast their good fortune with bottles of sparkling cava in the traditional Christmas lottery, the world’s largest.

Children carried on the tradition of singing the winning numbers and their corresponding prizes aloud as they were drawn at the hours-long, televised event in Madrid.