The world’s oldest living person has died peacefully in her sleep aged 117.
Spanish pensioner Maria Branyas Morera lived her last two decades in the Santa Maria del Tursa nursing home in Olot, northeastern Spain. Throughout her incredible life she survived a plague epidemic and two world wars.
Her family posted on X: “Maria Branyas has left us. She died as she wished: in her sleep, peacefully and without pain. We will always remember her for her advice and her kindness.”
Although experts had marvelled at Maria’s mental and physical health, the woman warned her followers with a heartbreaking message on Tuesday she felt “weak”.
“The time is near. Don’t cry, I don’t like tears. And above all, don’t suffer for me,” she said on the social media account, which is run by her family. “Wherever I go, I will be happy.”
Guinness World Records officially acknowledged Branyas’s title the oldest person on earth in January 2023 after the death of French nun Lucile Randon who died aged 118.
In the wake of Branyas’s death, the oldest living person in the world is Japan’s Tomiko Itooka, who was born on May 23, 1908 and is 116 years old, according to the US Gerontology Research Group.
Maria lived through the 1918 flu, World War I and World War II and Spain’s civil war even got Covid-19 in 2020. Her youngest daughter, Rosa Moret, has attributed her mum’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.
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