Spanish American, María Branyas Morera gets the title 

Spanish American, María Branyas Morera has been confirmed as the world’s oldest woman living and oldest person living.

At 115 years 321 days old, as of January 19, 2023, she gets the title following the death of 118-year-old Lucile Randon of France.

Morera was born in San Francisco, California, on March 4, 1907, one year after her parents emigrated to the country.

Eight years later, they decided to return to Spain, where they settled in Catalonia. María has called the region home ever since, residing in the same nursing home, Residència Santa María del Tura for the past 22 years.

Mrs Morera taking to Twitter

In an article posted on its website, Guinness World Records reports that Morera often takes to Twitter with the help of her daughter to share her pearls of wisdom. She attributes her longevity to “order, tranquility, good connection with family and friends, contact with nature, emotional stability, no worries, no regrets, lots of positivity, and staying away from toxic people”.

“I think longevity is also about being lucky. Luck and good genetics,” she has said.

“She is in good health and continues to be surprised and grateful for the attention that this anniversary has generated,” Guinness World Records quoted the nursing home as saying in a statement.

After surviving both World Wars, the Spanish Civil War, and the Spanish Flu pandemic, María also fought off COVID-19 in 2020.

Surviving COVID-19

She contracted the virus mere weeks after celebrating her 113th birthday; fortunately, she managed to make a full recovery within a few days. This made her the world’s oldest COVID-19 survivor. However, her record was broken by Lucile Randon later that year.

“This pandemic has revealed that older people are the forgotten ones of our society,” she said in an interview with the Observer at the time. María has three children, 11 grandchildren, and 13 great-grandchildren. 

Her husband was a Catalan doctor named Joan Moret, whom she married in 1931. Their wedding day proved to be an eventful one as, after “hours of waiting for the priest”, the couple was informed that he had unexpectedly died.

María has witnessed a remarkable number of technological advances since then. One of the most positive developments, in her opinion, is the ease with which people can now communicate with each other.

She has taken full advantage of this – in addition to Twitter, she also has a voice-to-text device which allows her family to easily communicate with her, given that she’s extremely hard of hearing.

However, for María, the grass is not necessarily greener. She believes that modern society places too much value on money, and, according to her, people lived “more peacefully and more joyfully” at the beginning of the 20th Century.