Mrs Branyas died at the age of 117, after two decades living in a nursing home in northeastern Spain.
“Mrs. Maria Branyas Morera has left us. She passed away as she wished, in her sleep, peacefully and without pain,” her family said on social network X on August 20. “We will always remember her for her advice and kindness.”
In a post earlier that day, Ms. Branyas announced that she was “feeling weak.” “The time is near. Don’t cry, I don’t like tears and above all don’t be sad because of me. I will be happy wherever I go,” Ms. Branyas said.
Guinness World Records recognized Branyas as the world’s oldest person in January 2023 after the death of French nun Lucile Randon at the age of 118. Branyas lived through the 1918 flu pandemic, two World Wars, and the Spanish Civil War. She contracted Covid-19 in 2020 a few weeks after her 113th birthday.
Her youngest daughter, Rosa Moret, said her mother’s longevity was “genetic.” “She never had to go to the hospital, she never broke a bone. She was fine and in no pain,” Moret said in 2023.
Ms. Maria Branyas Morera at her birthday party on March 4. Photo: Guinness World Records Organization
Branyas was born in San Francisco in 1907 to parents of Catalan descent. The family decided to return to Spain in 1915, when World War I complicated the journey across the Atlantic. Her father died of tuberculosis near the end of the trip.
Branyas settled in Barcelona with her mother, and married a doctor in 1931. The Spanish Civil War broke out five years later and ended in 1939. She lived with her husband for 40 years until his death at the age of 72. She had three children, one of whom died, 11 grandchildren and many great-grandchildren.
She has lived at the Santa Maria del Tura nursing home in Olot, northeastern Spain, for the past two decades. Manel Esteller, an expert at the University of Barcelona, studied Branyas’s DNA to find out why she lived so long. He said he was surprised by Branyas’s good health.
“She was completely lucid. She remembered the time when she was 4 years old very clearly, she did not have cardiovascular disease which is common in the elderly. She only had problems related to mobility and hearing. It was unbelievable,” Mr. Esteller said.
After Branyas passed away, Japanese woman Tomiko Itakeoka became the world’s oldest person, according to the American Gerontology Research Group. Itakeoka was born on May 23, 1908, and is now 116 years old.
The world’s oldest person in history was French woman Jeanne Louise Calment, who died in 1997 at the age of 122.