Some stories sound so improbable that even the most optimistic people furrow their brows for a moment. Such a story is currently unfolding in the small harbor town of Cassis on the French Mediterranean coast. Where sailing boats usually sway, tourists drink pastis, and the Calanques lie like a painting in the sun, suddenly it’s all about millions.
To be precise: almost 49 million euros.
At the center of the event is a modest tobacco shop with the typically southern French name „La Civette du Port“. A shop like many others really — cigarettes, magazines, lottery tickets, a short chat at the counter. But within just a week, this place developed into a sort of pilgrimage site for fortune seekers.
On April 21, a Euromillions ticket was first validated there, which brought a French winner part of more than 48 million euros. That alone is usually enough for headlines all over France. The Euromillions jackpot is one of the toughest lotteries in Europe after all. The odds of winning the top prize are somewhere in the astronomical range — about as realistic as a spontaneous snowstorm in the middle of summer in Marseille.
And then it happened again.
Just a few days later, the Française des Jeux again reported a million-euro win from the same shop. This time it was “only” about one million euros — won through the extra game “My Million,” which is automatically linked to every Euromillions ticket. A couple from the region was totally unexpectedly struck by this windfall.
Very special: the winner reportedly had dreamed several times before about winning the lottery. Friends initially just laughed about it. She then started playing regularly. Not fanatically, more with the motto: “Why not, actually?” In the end, it was not her personal combination of numbers that decided the win, but the automatically generated code of the extra game.
Well. That’s how life sometimes plays out.
In Cassis, almost everyone is talking about it by now. Groups of people keep gathering in front of the small shop. Tourists photograph the front door, locals suddenly regularly buy lottery tickets, even though for years they had not filled in a single one. The place thrives on stories — fishermen’s tales, harbor gossip, summer romances. But this chapter currently surpasses everything.
The shop owner is experiencing an exceptional situation. Between tobacco racks and postcards, it has been bustling for days. Some customers almost enter the shop with reverence, as if a bit of luck had lingered on the walls.
France loves stories like these.
Especially in times of economic uncertainty, lottery millionaires have an almost fairy-tale effect. Ordinary people, whose daily lives change completely within seconds — that touches many. Maybe because there is a quiet hope hidden in it: that life sometimes does open unexpected doors after all.
And Cassis provides the perfect setting for that. The small coastal town is already considered a dream place between Provence and the Mediterranean Sea. Narrow streets, colorful facades, cafés by the water — almost too beautiful to be true. Now it also has the reputation as a “luck harbor.”
Whether the miracle of Cassis continues, of course, nobody knows. Probably the statistics are more against it. But statistics hardly interest people as soon as millions are won somewhere.
The small tobacco shop at the harbor has meanwhile achieved cult status.
Or as many French now say: the famous “bureau de tabac porte-bonheur” — the lucky tobacco shop.
By C. Hatty