How much does Spain’s El Gordo lottery pay out in total?

How to get close to this number

Work from participation. Nearly everyone in a country of forty-eight million buys at least a share, tickets are sold in fractions costing around twenty euros, and roughly seventy percent of the take is returned as prizes. Population times average spend times the payout ratio gives a figure in the billions.

The structure is what makes it different from most lotteries: the prize money is spread across a very large number of modest wins rather than concentrated in a single jackpot. This site's Christmas spending question notes the consequence — participation is close to universal because the realistic outcome is a small return shared with colleagues, not a life change.

The continuity is the detail worth keeping: running every year since 1812, through two centuries of wars, dictatorship and regime change. Very few institutions of any kind have that record, and a lottery maintaining an unbroken annual draw through a civil war says something about what it functions as socially.