Maria Branyas Morera of Spain, the world’s oldest person, died at the age of 117 on Tuesday. She was born in the United States and lived through two world wars. “Maria Branyas has left us.”
“She died as she wished: in her sleep, peacefully, and painlessly,” her family stated on her X social media account. “We will always remember her for her advice and her kindness,” they told us. Branyas, who had spent the last two decades in the Santa Maria del Tura nursing home in Olot, northern Spain, had warned in a post on Tuesday that she felt “weak”.
“The hour is approaching. Don’t cry; I don’t like tears. Most importantly, do not suffer for me. “Wherever I go, I will be happy,” she said on the account owned by her family. Guinness World Records officially recognised Branyas’ status as the world’s oldest person in January 2023, following the death of French nun Lucile Randon at the age of 118.
Following Branyas’ death, the world’s oldest living person is Japan’s Tomiko Itooka, who was born on May 23, 1908 and is now 116 years old, according to the US Gerontology Research Group.
Branyas, who survived the 1918 flu, World Wars I and II, and Spain’s civil war, contracted Covid-19 in 2020, only weeks after celebrating her 113th birthday, and was confined to her room at home until recovering completely. Rosa Moret, her youngest daughter, once attributed her mother’s longevity to “genetics”.
“She has never gone to the hospital, she has never broken any bones, she is fine, and she is not in pain,” Moret told regional Catalan television in 2023. Branyas was born in San Francisco on March 4, 1907, shortly after her family relocated to the United States from Mexico.
As World War I raged, the entire family chose to return to their homeland of Spain in 1915, complicating the ship passage across the Atlantic. The passage was also characterised by tragedy: her father died of tuberculosis near the conclusion of the expedition, and his coffin was dumped into the sea. Branyas and her mother have settled in Barcelona.
She married a doctor in 1931, five years before Spain’s 1936-39 civil war broke out. The pair lived together for four decades before her husband died at the age of 72. She had three children, one of whom had already died, 11 grandchildren, and countless great-grandchildren.
Manel Esteller, a member of a team of researchers at the University of Barcelona who investigated Branyas’ DNA to understand the causes of her longevity, told the daily Spanish newspaper ABC in October 2023 that he was shocked by her good health. “Her thinking is perfectly clear.
She recalls events from when she was four years old with remarkable clarity, and she is free of cardiovascular illness, which is common among the elderly. She just has mobility and hearing difficulties. “It’s incredible,” the genetics professor stated. The oldest verified person to have ever lived was Frenchwoman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days.
