As news spread, the farmers raced into town on their tractors. The mayor, Rosa Pons, used a megaphone to congratulate everyone. Anica Bordei, the cafe manager, ran into the street with her socks on, even though they had holes in the toes. In what seemed like 20 minutes, the bankers were on hand to collect the tickets and then the local news media showed up.

“Some of the ladies talked about going to the hairdresser,” Mayor Pons said. “But the hairdresser won, too. And she said, ‘I’m not working today.’ So that ended that.”

The lottery, first established in 1812, is a huge event in Spain. Many people take the morning off to watch the televised coverage of the numbers being drawn from a gilded spinning cage. Spain’s lottery works differently from those in the United States. This year there were 1,800 first-prize-winning tickets with the same number, 58268, each paying $520,000. As the tickets cost $26 each, they are often broken down into $6.50 “participations.”

The Sodeto homemakers’ association sells the tickets every year and usually nets about $1,300, which it uses to pay for food and decorations during local festivals. (It gets a small percentage of every ticket sold.) This year the tickets the women sold, here and in visits to 17 neighboring villages, brought in more than $150 million in winnings.

Even now, the residents of Sodeto are prone to giggling when they retell the stories of where they were when they heard, and how they almost did not buy any tickets, or how someone’s grandmother had a secret stash of tickets tucked away in her purse.