Madrid, Dec 22 (DPA) The world’s biggest lottery showered prizes worth more than 2.3 billion euros (about $3 billion) on Spanish winners Wednesday.
The Spanish Christmas lottery has been running for more than 200 years.
The jackpot of three million euros, known as El Gordo (The Fat One), will be divided between people holding tickets numbered 79250.
It will be paid out 195 times, the number of times tickets with the winning number were sold.
It is rare for anyone to win the entire jackpot, because most people only buy fractions of a ticket. An entire ticket costs a hefty 200 euros.
The jackpot went to winners in cities around the country, including Barcelona, Alicante, Tenerife, Madrid, Caceres, Palencia, Murcia and Zaragoza.
The second prize – for the number 00147 – worth 1 million euros, was divided mainly between winners in Madrid and northern cities including Burgos, La Coruna, Llerida and Zaragoza.
It is common for workmates to pool resources to buy tickets, and for businesses to distribute tenths of tickets among their clients.
Winners of the two top prizes included a group of truck drivers in the southern city of Huelva, and a group of residents in the Basque locality of Sestao, who had bought the number of the second prize for 40 years.
Lottery sellers who sold the top jackpot number in Alcorcon near Madrid said they had hired a medium to attract El Gordo to their kiosk.
In the pilgrimage site of Santiago de Compostela, another seller who sold the number of the second prize attributed his luck to Saint James, the patron of the city.
In the southern village of Velez de Benaudalla, where residents netted 30 million euros from the second prize, the lottery was a ‘relief’ for many families living in a ‘terrible’ economic situation, mayor Pilar Peramos said.
When children from the San Ildefonso school for orphans chanted the winning numbers during the three-hour-long draw, as tradition demands, nearly the entire country came to a standstill as people clustered in front of radio or television sets.
Per Spaniard, spending averaged nearly 60 euros on the Christmas lottery, 0.26 percent less than in 2009, the national lottery agency said.
The minimal decline in sales was attributed by analysts to Spain’s 20-percent unemployment rate, the highest in Western Europe. At the same time, however, many people were hoping a stroke of luck in the lottery would solve their economic problems.
This year’s lottery followed the government’s announcement that it would privatize 30 percent of the national lottery agency. The plan was criticized by lottery sellers fearful of job losses and changes in their working conditions.
The Spanish Christmas lottery is billed as the world’s oldest. It goes back to 1763, when King Charles III needed money for state coffers. The game has been played in its current form since 1812.
