Just a few weeks ago, the 70 households in this isolated farming village were struggling under Spain’s economic downturn and the ravages of a severe drought. fast forward a litle bit and now the whole town has won $950 million. Only thing is – it wasn’t the whole town because one guy decided not to play. How crunchy does he feel right now!?!? Click below to read the rest.

@WiLMajor

Some were even thinking of passing up Spain’s huge Christmas lottery, known as El Gordo — the fat one — which is something of a national obsession. But they bought tickets out of loyalty to the homemakers’ association here, which makes a small percentage on the sales.

And then, their number came in.

All but one household in Sodeto held at least a piece of a winning ticket in the lottery’s huge first prize, $950 million, the biggest ever.

Some of Sodeto’s residents, mostly farmers and unemployed construction workers, won millions. The least fortunate came away with a minimum of $130,000 — and the giddy feeling that life, in its mysterious ways, was giving them another chance.

It is one of the rare bits of happy news amid the relentlessly gloomy European economic crisis, in which Spain has been one of the hardest of the hard-luck cases. But it has not come without its own cost: the village, until now just a dot on the map about three hours northwest of Barcelona, has been inundated with salespeople and fortune seekers ever since.

On a recent morning, the vendors just kept showing up: bankers in suits offering high interest rates, car salesmen talking up BMWs and furniture dealers going door to door.

Like many other local farmers, José Manuel Penella Cambra, who had recently invested in more efficient irrigation techniques, worried about how he would meet his payments. But his wife bought two tickets, worth $260,000, and his son found two more she had bought earlier and had forgotten about, bringing the total to $520,000.

“I kept saying: look for some more, look for some more,” he joked in the village cafe, a shabby establishment with a few Formica tables and a ripped black leatherette sofa. “But this money means that now we can breathe. And the best part is that it isn’t just me. Everybody won.”

NYT