SPAIN KICKS OFF HOLIDAYS WITH ‘EL GORDO’ LOTTERY

Spain kicked off the winter holidays with its huge Christmas lottery known as “El Gordo,” and an unemployed Peruvian woman was among the winners of The Fat One’s top $425,000 prize Thursday.

The winning ticket number was announced in Madrid’s Teatro Real opera theater, where the woman, who was identified only by her first name, Perla, was immediately surrounded by reporters during the nationally televised event.

The woman said she lost her job at a cafe two years ago and had bought lottery tickets “everywhere I have visited this year.” She revealed she purchased the ticket in Spain’s northern Asturias region.

The woman said she planned to use her lottery proceeds, which amount to some $345,000 after taxes, to buy an apartment in Madrid, where her children attend primary school, and to make a donation to an unspecified church.

The incredibly popular El Gordo dishes out a total of $2.7 billion in prize money, much of it in hundreds of smaller amounts. Purchasing and sharing tickets, known in Spanish as “decimos” (tenths) in the run-up to Christmas is a tradition among families, friends and co-workers, and in bars and sports and social clubs.

For weeks beforehand there are queues, even in the cold and rain, outside lottery offices, especially those that have sold winning tickets in the past. Ticket sales begin months ahead — this year as early as July.

The Dec. 22 lottery began in 1812. Other lotteries have bigger individual top prizes but Spain’s Christmas lottery, held each year on Dec. 22, is ranked as the world’s richest for the total prize money involved.