fires that raged out of control<\/a> around La Ba\u00f1eza in August destroyed 55,000 hectares (136,000 acres) of woodland, killed three people and displaced a further 8,000.<\/p>\nJavier Carrera, the mayor of La Ba\u00f1eza, said Monday\u2019s win has produced \u201ca cascade of emotions after such a terrible year\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cWinning the lottery, as well as cause for joy and excitement, is something that has fallen from the heavens to a place that needs so much,\u201d Carrera said.<\/p>\n
As part of the annual tradition, the lottery draw is announced by children from a Madrid school who chant the winning numbers. Photograph: Manu Fern\u00e1ndez\/AP<\/p>\n
El Gordo, or the fat one, as the Christmas lottery is known, consists of 100,000 numbers, each repeated in 198 series with each series divided into d\u00e9cimos, or tenths. Thus each number is repeated 1,980 times.<\/p>\n
Each d\u00e9cimo costs \u20ac20 and the winning number pays out \u20ac400,000 (\u00a3349,000) for each decimo. A total of 117 series were sold in La Ba\u00f1eza, equal to \u20ac468m to be shared among its inhabitants.<\/p>\n
There are thousands of lesser prizes and the numbers are selected in a daylong televised ritual by children from San Ildefonso school in Madrid who chant each number and its associated prize money.<\/p>\n
Among the many superstitions surrounding El Gordo is a tradition of buying a ticket in a place that has suffered a tragedy on the basis that lightning doesn\u2019t strike twice and good luck follows bad. Now, after a terrible year, fortune has smiled on the unlucky residents of La Ba\u00f1eza and Villablino.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When the village of La Ba\u00f1eza in Castilla y Le\u00f3n was engulfed in one of the worst forest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":205807,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-205806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=205806"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/205806\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/205807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=205806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=205806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=205806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}