People mostly hear about massive money earning stories from America; whether it’s the lottery or some other form of lucky sweepstakes, people end up walking away with tens or hundreds of millions depending on the build up. While that is an insane amount of money to earn by doing nothing, those amounts don’t come anywhere close to matching the recent lottery winners in Spain, which earned multiple residents money, with a total 2.2 billion euros ($2.7 billion USD) in winnings.
El Gordo, also known as the Christmas lottery in Spain, pays out the world’s richest monetary amount each year. The lottery began back in 1812 and is the second longest running continuous lottery in the entire world. The prize payouts depend on how many people in Spain purchase tickets, and in 2013, if all of them were sold the total collective payout would have been $3.2 billion. Each year there are multiple winners, but the top three prize payouts go to a single person each. This year the top winners each won 400,000 euros (just over $486,000 USD), while thousands of other people in Spain also won some amount of money.
It’s tradition that students from the Madrid school select the wooden balls that display the winning numbers on live television and sing them out loud. The entire program is a national event similar to New Year’s Eve in the United States that everyone tunes in for and lasts four hours on TV. People everywhere in the country gather together to watch the television program and see if they or their friends and loved ones are lucky enough to have purchased a winning ticket and make the Christmas holiday just a little bit sweeter than it already is. While many other lotteries around the world have larger individual payouts for the single winners, Spain knows how to spread the love and make tons of people happy by offering the largest amount of total sums paid out.
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