El Gordo de Navidad gives away more than €2.3 billion in lottery prizes

 

EL GORDO DE NAVIDAD GIVES AWAY MORE THAN €2.3 BILLION IN LOTTERY PRIZES

The highly anticipated “El Gordo de Navidad” lottery drawing took place yesterday in Madrid, Spain, and gave away huge prizes to ticket holders, including a top prize worth €4 million to each serie.The Spanish Christmas Lottery was announced in November with a heart-warming TV advert, and unlike most lottery draws, the El Gordo began first thing in the morning, at 9am in the Spanish capital, but the first prize was not won until almost three hours later when two school children sung the top-prize winning number, the same two children who did the honour last year, a Christmas tradition for Spanish lottery players. The first prize of €4 million was ‘sung’ at 11.57am, while the second prize, worth €1,250,000, was sung half an hour earlier, at 11.23.The top prize in the El Gordo lottery is worth €4 million, and the winning number was 66513. Almost all of the top prize winning tickets were sold by a retailer on the Paseo de la Esperanza in Madrid. The owners of the retailer, Agustin and María José Rojo, said that they were delighted to have sold some of the winning El Gordo tickets, especially since their store in located in a working-class area where families will hugely benefit from their lottery fortune, as winners of the Spanish Christmas lottery did last year after similarly huge prizes were paid out the country over.Lottery players also have an option to buy a ‘décimo’, or a tenth of a ticket, which carries the same number as a regular ticket but entitles the winner to a tenth of the prize, which means those with the ‘décimo’ ticket number 66513 will receive €400,000. Some of the winners of the ‘décimo’ ticket were residents of an elderly care home in Madrid, where 90% of the residents held a ticket with the number 66513.Some of the care home residents said that they’d be giving the majority of their prize money to their children or grandchildren, and staff members who had also bought tickets told lottery officials that they couldn’t choose between laughing and crying!The El Gordo lottery certainly will have changed lives in the run up to Christmas, just like it did last year when a winner was able to return home to Senegal thanks to the lottery, but it’s not over, as the traditional El Niño draw, which last year made one province of Spain very rich indeed, will take place on January 6th, offering €630 million in lottery prizes.Purchase your El Niño lottery tickets online at Lottery24.com.