20 August 2024 , 20:06
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Supercentenarian who died in her sleep had lived through two world wars and Spain’s civil war
The world’s oldest known person, Spain’s Maria Branyas Morera, who was born in the US in 1907 and lived through two pandemics and two world wars, has died at the age of 117, her family said.
“Maria Branyas has left us. She died as she wished: in her sleep, peacefully and without pain,” her family wrote on her account on X on Tuesday. “We will always remember her for her advice and her kindness.”
Branyas, who had lived for the past two decades in the Santa Maria del Tura nursing home in the town of Olot in north-eastern Spain, had said in a post that she felt weak. “The time is near. Don’t cry, I don’t like tears. And above all, don’t suffer for me. Wherever I go, I will be happy,” she said in the post on her account, which is run by her family.
Guinness World Records had officially acknowledged Branyas’s status as the world’s oldest person in January 2023 after the death, aged 118, of the French nun Lucile Randon.
The oldest living person now is Japan’s Tomiko Itooka, who was born on 23 May 1908 and is 116, according to the US Gerontology Research Group.
Branyas, who lived through the 1918 flu, the first and second world wars and Spain’s civil war, got Covid-19 in 2020, just weeks after her 113th birthday. She was confined to her room at the home but made a full recovery.
Her youngest daughter, Rosa Moret, once attributed her mother’s longevity to genetics. “She has never gone to the hospital, she has never broken any bones, she is fine, she has no pain,” Moret told regional Catalan television in 2023.
Branyas told the Guinness World Records website she believed her longevity stemmed from “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity and staying away from toxic people”.
“I think longevity is also about being lucky,” said Branyas, who used a voice-to-text device to express herself later in life.
She was born in San Francisco on 4 March 1907, shortly after her family moved to the US from Mexico. After also spending time in Texas and New Orleans, the family returned to their native Spain in 1915 as the first world war was under way, which complicated the voyage across the Atlantic.
The crossing was marked by tragedy – her father died from tuberculosis towards the end of the voyage and his coffin was thrown into the sea.
Branyas and her mother settled in Barcelona. In 1931, five years before the start of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war, she married a doctor. The couple lived together for four decades until her husband died at the age of 72. They had three children – one of whom has died – 11 grandchildren and many great-grandchildren.
Manel Esteller, part of a team of researchers from the University of Barcelona who studied Branyas’s DNA to determine the causes of her longevity, told the daily Spanish newspaper ABC in October 2023 he was surprised by her good health.
“Her mind is completely lucid. She remembers with impressive clarity episodes from when she was only four years old, and she has no cardiovascular disease, which is common in the elderly. The only things she has are mobility and hearing problems. It’s incredible,” the genetics professor said.
The oldest verified person to have ever lived was Jeanne Louise Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days.