In the venerable Teatro Real opera house in Madrid, students from boarding school San Ildefonso sing the results again. A total of 2.52 billion euros awaits the winners on Thursday. Most tickets are sold in Spain, but more and more foreigners are participating online.
The ceremony lasts up to four hours, as many smaller prizes are also drawn. The main prize, called “El Gordo” (the fat one), is four million euros for a whole ticket. It is paid out 180 times because each of the 100,000 ticket numbers has been sold the same number of times.
Launched in Cadiz in 1812, the lottery is considered the oldest in the world and also the largest due to the total amount played. However, the individual winnings are not as staggering as some other lotteries, but there are many winners.
In Spain, the Christmas lottery is a huge event: even people who are otherwise not interested in gambling often buy a ticket for the Christmas lottery, a so-called décimo, a tenth ticket, from July for 20 euros. An audience of millions follows the drawing live on television.
There are two lottery drums. The first, larger drum contains 100,000 wooden balls with the lottery numbers, in the second smaller 1807 wooden balls with the winnings. During the draw, two balls always fall from both drums at the same time into a glass bowl.
(SDA)