Ms. Morera, who cultivated a following on social media as “Super Catalan Grandma,” died peacefully in her sleep, her family said.
Maria Branyas Morera, an American-born Spanish woman believed to be the oldest person in the world, has died, according to her family. She was 117.
Ms. Morera died on Aug. 19 in Olot, Spain, according to an employee at her nursing home, Residencia Santa Maria del Tura. Her family wrote in a post on her X account that she had died peacefully, in her sleep.
“A few days ago she told us: ‘One day I will leave here. I will not try coffee again, nor eat yogurt,’” her family wrote in Spanish in the post. “‘I will also leave my memories, my reflections and I will cease to exist in this body. One day I don’t know, but it’s very close, this long journey will be over.’”
Born in March 1907 in San Francisco, Ms. Morera grew up in several American cities, including New Orleans, where her father, a journalist, started a Spanish-language magazine that went bankrupt, according to several news stories written about her life. Facing dire straits, the family returned to Spain when Ms. Morera was a child.
There, she lived through the brutal Franco regime, when the country was wracked by civil war, and she survived both World Wars. She had clear memories of the D-Day invasion at Normandy, she told the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia.
“I haven’t done anything special to get to this age,” she said in an interview with the Spanish newspaper El País earlier this year.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
