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Spain’s ‘Fat One’ US$3.1b jackpot brings Xmas cheers
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Champagne corks popped across Spain yesterday as the annual “Fat One” Christmas lottery, which has the world’s biggest total payout, spread 2.24 billion euros (US$3.1 billion) in prizes around the country, where one in four is out of work.
Millions of people were glued to TV sets as children from a Madrid school that used to be a home for orphans picked wooden balls bearing the winning numbers and prizes out of two giant golden tumblers and then sang them out in a live draw lasting over three hours.
Unlike other big lotteries that generate just a few big winners, Spain’s Christmas lottery aims for a share-the-wealth system rather than a single jackpot, and thousands of numbers yield at least some kind of return. It is known as “El Gordo” in Spanish, or the “Fat One.”
Prizes range from the face value of a 20-euro ticket — in other words you get your money back — to the top prize of 400,000 euros which this year went to the number 62246.
A total of 1,600 tickets with that number were sold — just over half of them in Leganes, a working-class suburb south of Madrid that is home to around 200,000.
Money handy
“I was in bed and my heart started racing when I heard that the top prize fell in Leganes,” Alfonso Martinez, 53, who has been out of work for eight months, said outside the state lottery office where he bought his winning ticket.
“I really needed it, I really needed it because at 53, getting a job at this point is impossible.”
Winners opened bottles of bubbly outside of the office and celebrated together in scenes of joy repeated across the country.
Before Spain’s property-led economic boom collapsed in 2008, sending the jobless rate soaring to 26 percent, winners often talked of buying new cars or taking a luxury holiday.
Now they mostly speak about paying their mortgage and helping their families.
“It is enough of a luxury to pay the mortgage,” Raul Clavero, a 26-year-old mechanic from Leganes whose parents are unemployed, said when asked what he would do with his prize money.
Another 450 tickets with the winning number for the top prize were sold in the northern city Modragon, home to the headquarters of major Spanish appliance maker Fagor which filed for bankrupcy in October, leaving hundreds of people out of work.
Jose Mari Garai, the manager of a lottery office in Modragon’s San Andres neighbourhood where a Fagor factory is located that sold several winning tickets, said the prize had “lifted spirits.”
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