Born in San Francisco in 1907 and raised in Catalonia, Branyas outlived nearly every contemporary and became an unlikely social media presence in her final years, sharing reflections on longevity, family, and living through more than a century of upheaval. Her death drew global attention to the science and mystery of extreme human lifespan.
Maria Branyas Morera was born in California in 1907 to Spanish parents who moved the family back to Catalonia when she was a young child, and from there she witnessed a century unfold: the Spanish Civil War, two World Wars she watched from a distance, the 1918 influenza pandemic which she herself contracted and survived, and the digital age, which she embraced with startling enthusiasm by opening a Twitter account in her hundred-and-eleventh year.
Recognized by Guinness World Records as the world's oldest living person after the death of a French supercentenarian in 2023, Branyas became something of a folk celebrity, dispensing wry observations on her longevity — she credited order, calm, family, contact with nature, and a lack of worry, along with, she joked, plenty of yogurt. Researchers studying her genome as part of longevity studies found unusually protective genetic markers, adding her case to a small but growing scientific literature on centenarians and supercentenarians.
She died at her nursing home in Olot, Catalonia, at 117 years and 168 days old, having outlived her husband and, by then, nearly everyone from her original generation. Her final recorded words on social media reportedly reflected on the mystery of having lived so extraordinarily long, a reminder of how rare and strange it is for any human life to stretch across more than a century of history.