“Maria Branyas has left us. She passed away as she wished: in her sleep, peacefully and without pain,” her family announced today on the platform X (formerly Twitter).
Previously, the family had published a farewell message on behalf of the 117-year-old: “The time is near. Do not cry, I do not like tears. And above all: Do not suffer because of me. Wherever I go, I will be happy.”
According to the Guinness “Book of Records,” Branyas had been recognized as the world’s oldest living person for more than a year and a half. She was born on March 4, 1907, in San Francisco, and in 1915, her family moved from the USA to Spain. Branyas spent her last 20 years in a retirement home in Olot, in northeastern Spain.
Branyas’ daughter attributed her mother’s Methuselah-like longevity in an interview last year to her genes. “She was never in the hospital, she never broke a bone,” she said on Spanish television. At the age of 113, Branyas even survived a COVID-19 infection.
With Branyas’ death, the 116-year-old Japanese woman Tomiko Itooka is now the oldest living person on Earth.