Maria Branyas, who for more than a year has been the oldest person in the world, turns 117 this Monday. Born in San Francisco on March 4, 1907, to Catalan parents, she has lived at the Santa Maria del Tura residence in Olot for more than two decades, where she hopes that her family will bring her a birthday cake and her classmates at the center will give her gifts. a craft like every year to celebrate the anniversary, as her daughter Rosa Moret explains to ACN.
According to her daughter, “she has been losing weight in recent months,” and since last summer she has suffered “a slow decline” although “it doesn’t hurt at all, she doesn’t have any illness.” Branyas is two months away from being one of the ten oldest people in history, even though she sees the records as “nonsense.”
According to the Gerontology Research Group (GRG) association, which maintains the list of Guinness records in longevity by verifying dates of birth and death, today there are eleven people who lived longer than Branyas, all of them women and none of them are currently alive.
On May 10 it will have advanced to two, so it will enter the top 10. The same sources affirm that there have only been four people who have reached the age of 118, and only one has passed the twelfth decade of life: the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who died at 122 years and 164 days in August 1997.
Branyas became the oldest person alive on January 17, 2023, when Frenchwoman Lucile Randon, 118, died. The second oldest person on the planet right now according to the GRG is the Japanese Tomiko Itooka, who is one year younger than the Catalan.
In any case, Branyas’ daughter, Rosa Moret, expresses that her mother is aware of the fact that there is no one in the world older than her, but that she does not care. “She says that this is of no merit to her or anyone else,” she explains, adding that the family did not expect her to live so many years. She also comments that “the world is very big and it is difficult to get the idea” that her mother tops the longevity ranking on a planetary level.
Moret reveals that she has not been hospitalized, but that with age, in recent times she has lost vision, hearing and lately, also memory, in addition to mobility, since she cannot walk alone. Despite everything, she keeps her mental faculties intact and can still maintain a conversation with her family, the only ones who will see her besides the staff at her residence. “She no longer does interviews or anything like that, what she wants is peace of mind,” says Rosa. Her mother spends the day sitting in the armchair in her room where she often receives attention from the center’s professionals.
During the interview, Moret also explains that Branyas has seen all of his friends die, but that surely one of the factors that has led him to live so many years is “that he adapts a lot.” “When there is a death and you are upset, but after a little while you react, saying that it is what it is, God wanted it that way, we have to adapt and we have to continue living,” he explains. In fact, resilience is a lesson that Branyas has taught young people on several occasions, her daughter adds.
Born on March 4, 1907 in San Francisco, California, into a Catalan family, Branyas arrived in Catalonia as a child and has memories that date back to the First World War and the Spanish Civil War, as she explained in 2019 in an interview with Catalan News.
In fact, the family’s return to Catalonia, when she was 7 years old, occurred in 1914, in the midst of the outbreak of the first great war of the 20th century. “We arrived by boat. Because of the war, Germany attacked the north and you couldn’t cross the Nordic seas, we had to go through the Azores and Cuba,” she explained.
In May 2020, Maria Branyas became the oldest person in the world by surviving Covid-19 at the age of 113 and, almost three years later, she became the oldest person on the planet.