Spaniards Swept Up in ‘Fat’ Lottery

Schoolchildren chanted the winning number Saturday for the grand prize in Spain’s Christmas lottery, billed as the richest in the world with $1.26 billion in total prize money.

The sweepstakes, known as El Gordo, or the Fat One, had crowds huddling by television sets in bars and living rooms, waiting to see whether their five-digit number would be the lucky one.

Under a complex share-the-wealth system, El Gordo has a top prize of $1.6 million, and as many as 1,700 people can share it. The most any single ticket can win is $160,000. There are thousands of winners.

The winning number for the grand prize this year was 18,795.

One of the big winners was a folkloric music and dance company on Tenerife in the Canary Islands. Its members reaped $80 million after buying 500 tickets with the lucky number, state lottery officials said.

Hundreds of winning tickets also were sold in the southern province of Murcia.

In accordance with a 189-year-old tradition, the wooden balls were plucked from a golden tumbler and the winning numbers were sung in high-pitched tones by children at the San Idelfonso elementary school in Madrid.

To buy an El Gordo ticket, players had to wager $16 and choose a number between 00001 and 65,999.

Each number could appear on as many as 1,700 tickets.

The combination that sold out quickest this year was 11,901, known as “Bin Laden’s number” because it represents Sept. 11, 2001, the day of the attacks in the United States.

This year, this nation of 42 million people bought more than 100 million tickets, spending a total of $1.7 billion on El Gordo, an average of $41 per inhabitant.