Fiesta as town scoops €515m

SEVENTEEN HUNDRED residents of a small Catalan town won €300,000 each yesterday in a €515 million Christmas lottery bonanza for the local community.

The lottery, known as El Gordo the Fat One sprinkled more than $2.4 billion (€2.02 billion) in Christmas cheer around Spain, with a quarter of the windfall going to a town previously best known for its churches and convents.

There are lots of ways to win at least something in Spain's nearly 200-year-old Christmas sweepstakes, but the luckiest gamblers this year held the first-prize number 20085.

The lottery features a complex system of shared numbers designed to spread wealth rather than concentrate it in a jackpot. Each five-digit number ranging from 00001 to 85000 appeared on 1,700 tickets costing €20 apiece.

And this year all 1,700 tickets with the number 20085 were sold by one lottery office in Vic, 40 miles north of Barcelona. Each was worth €300,000. So in one fell swoop, winnings of €515 million rained on Vic.

The office regularly offered that number among its tickets every year but it had never struck lucky until now, said Miquel Codina, son of the lottery office manager. "We have been waiting for this for years," he told the news agency Efe.

That lottery office sold tickets both to individuals and to bars and restaurants, which, as per Spanish custom, then turned around and sold them to customers, either as they were or divvying them up into smaller shares.

Vic restaurant owner Carme Criviller did that, selling 10-euro shares that ended up fetching €182m in winnings for employees and customers.

But two of her 10 employees, a cook and a waitress decided not to gamble "because they are anti-lottery."

"I think we are going to have to do something for them, give them a gift," Criviller told Efe.

The lottery is a hallowed Spanish tradition that marks the official start of the holiday season. It takes more than three hours because nearly 1,800 of the numbers read out bring some kind of prize. They range from the face value of the ticket to the main prize, known as El Gordo.

This year's version was full of suspense because it took about two-and-a-half hours for the luckiest number to emerge.

The lottery is billed as the world's richest for prize money dished out, although others have bigger individual prizes.