World’s oldest person Spain’s Maria Branyas Morera dies at 117

The world’s oldest person, Spain’s Maria Branyas Morera, who was born in the US in 1907 and lived through two world wars, has died at the age of 117, her family said on Tuesday.

“Maria Branyas has left us. She died as she wished: in her sleep, peacefully and without pain,” her family wrote on her account on social network X on Tuesday. “We will always remember her for her advice and her kindness,” they said.

Branyas, who had lived for the last two decades in the Santa Maria del Tura nursing home in the town of Olot in north-eastern Spain, had warned 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 added 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.

In the wake of Branyas’s death, the oldest living person in the world is Japan’s Tomiko Itooka, who was born on 23 May 1908 and is 116 years old, 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 ringing in her 113th birthday. She was confined to her room at the home but made a full recovery.