The top prize of the ‘El Gordo’ Christmas Lottery, drawn in Madrid on Friday, was sung out by a pair of nervous schoolboys. The number is 88008, resulting in €4,000,000 per ten ticket series winning €400,000 for each ticket holder.
In keeping with tradition, the lucky numbers were sung by children from Madrid’s San Ildefonso school in a nationally televised draw on Friday from the Teatro Opera House in the capital.
This keenly awaited lottery has proven to be worth the wait, handing out more than $2.86 billion in prizes to hundreds of winners across the country, spreading its wealth far and wide.
The complex rules of the draw, which allow for many purchases of the same lottery number, make it almost impossible to determine exactly how many people have won. The tickets with the winning number are often sold across several towns and cities, many of which are within the Vega Baja. Indeed, on Friday, prizes to the value of 101,818,000 euros were won in the province of Alicante alone.
The most anticipated prize, ‘the Fat One’, went to number 88008, leaving a total of 6,000,000 euros in 15 tenths. Most of them have been won in Elche, although other lucky people with a share of the top prize can be found in Benidorm, Torrevieja, Alicante and Santa Pola.
Of especial significance is the 5th prize award that was won by Ana and Anastasia, lifelong friends who run a cafeteria in Los Andenes de Orihuela.
The friendship between the Russian Anastasia and Ukrainian Ana, led them to set up a joint business that opened its doors on August 1 in the heart of Orihuela, in Los Andenes. It is a cafeteria that they chose to call “La Bohemia”.
Far from the bloodshed that is taking place thousands of kilometres away, and oblivious to the war that their two countries have been fighting for almost two years , these friends and partners have experienced two exciting moments in just five months, on August 1, with the opening of the cafeteria, and on December 22, which will be marked forever by the cafeteria, having distributed 1.2 million euros among its customers with the number 86007, the fifth prize, which has 23 ticket holders in Orihuela, 20 of them in ‘La Bohemia’.
They chose the ticket number from the lottery outlet “Doña Lidia”. “We liked it because it starts with 86, the year of birth of both of out births,” explained Anastasia, who couldn’t hold back her excitement as lucky customers continued to arrive at the bar. “We wanted number that would only be sold in the cafeteria, so we took that one and look how lucky we were,” she says. They have sold 200 tenths worth 6,000 euros, to each happy winner.
‘The Golden Rabbit’, a lottery outlet located in one of the busiest Carrefour shopping centres in the country in Torrevieja, is another blessed sales point having seen many Christmas Lottery wins in recent years. And 2023 they had more lucky winners with one person scooping the top prize with ticket 88008, but also loose tenths of two fifth prizes, 01568 and 86007.
The state lottery organiser (Selae) estimated that the expenditure, per person, for this year’s Christmas lottery was 71.67 euros, around two euros more than in 2022, but don’t worry if you didn’t win on Friday you can always look forward to the El Niño, the similar, but less well known, lottery draw with a prize pot of 700 million euro, that could bring you some extra cash in the new year, on 6 January.
