Luck wins the Fat One

A town called "Luck" lived up to its name on Wednesday, turning up the winning ticket in Spain's Christmas lottery, one of the world's biggest prizes known as El Gordo (The Fat One).

The ticket which scooped a prize of 390 million euros ($522.1 million) was sold at a lottery office called The Golden Witch (La Bruixa D'Or) in the town of Sort, which in the Catalan language means "luck."

Each ticket can be divided into a maximum of 1,950 segments, although those can then be shared again in cartels in which whole villages may take part. Sort also sold one of the prize-winning numbers in last year's Christmas draw.

El Gordo is the top prize in a lottery which gives out 1.8 billion euros in prizes, or 70 percent of the value of tickets sold, and marks the start of Christmas. The ritual in which children sing out the prize-winning numbers in a draw takes several hours and brings Spain to a virtual standstill.

The tickets are even sold abroad and earlier this year a "decimo," the smallest division of a ticket, was selling in London for 50 pounds ($97.40), more than three times the price in Spain, where it costs 20 euros.