El Gordo is often reported as the biggest lottery in the world, with hundreds of millions of Euros available to be won. This year, the famous Spanish lottery game coughed up €640 million to one particularly small Spanish town.
The amazing outcome was only possible as a large number of players from Roquetas de Mar had actually purchased a sizeable number tickets – 1,600 in fact. As the winnings numbers were pulled out on December 22, most winners actually came from this town by the sea.
A big win like this is exactly what the small town needed, since they had fallen on some particularly though times of late, with the economic depression, and high unemployment.
El Gordo – known officially as the Sorteo Extraordinario de Navidad (the Spanish Christmas Lottery) was first played in 1812, and is the second oldest lottery game in the world. It is considered the largest lottery in the world, with prizes capable of reaching as high as €2.5 billion. El Gordo is the name of the largest section of prizes, which this year was won by the crowd from Roquetas de Mar.
The general system of El Gordo is for towns and residents to only sell tickets containing one or two numbers. In this manner, players will often win from the same area, since the number drawn is widespread among tickets from that area. For instance, in 2011, the El Gordo prize was paid out entirely to people in Grãnen, Huesca, whilst Vic in Catalonia, shared the 2005 prize, in much the same fashion as the majority of the 2015 prize was won by hose in Roquetas de Mar.
This lottery is only played once per year, so anybody who didn’t pick up anything will have to wait until next Christmas to potentially bag a share of the spoils.
Leave a Reply