Angelina Torres, the oldest woman in Catalonia and one of the oldest in the world, dies at 112.

BarcelonaAngelina Torres, the oldest woman in Catalonia, died this Monday at the age of 112 years and almost eight months. Born in Bellvís, in the Pla d'Urgell region, on March 18, 1913, she was also the oldest woman in Spain and among the 40 oldest people in the world, according to the Gerontology Research Group (GRG), which verifies birth and death dates. Torres was the last living Catalan born before the outbreak of the First World War and, as a child, she even spoke with the bricklayers who laid the foundations of the Sagrada Família. When she asked them what they were building, the workers replied: "We will build a church that Catalonia will be proud of," Torres explained in an interview with ACN in March. In that same interview, on the occasion of her 112th birthday, she joked about your genetics"The doctors haven't had to do much work with me." Her mother died just shy of 100, and one of her sisters lived to 93. Torres was the fifth of seven children; her father worked as a barber in Fondarella, and her mother was a housewife in Montblanc. When she was little, her father died in a carriage accident, and the family moved to Barcelona with her mother, who had found work in the capital. She explained that the city has changed a lot in the last century, but she still remembered the street dances people used to do on holidays and festivals: "For Sant Joan, we'd go to Montjuïc, to the Font del Gat, to eat the cake."

The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, offered his condolences to the family and recalled his visit to their home in Barcelona last year. "A wise woman, full of faith and kindness, very hardworking and with great strength," the head of the Catalan government said on the X network. "I will always remember a phrase she told me that made a big impression on me: we must help each other, with open hands, never with clasped hands. As I promised her, that's what I will do." Now, the oldest woman in Catalonia, according to CRG, is Carme Noguera, born in Olot in 1914, who turned 111 this August and whom the ARA interviewed in February

More than 3,000 centenarians

Stories like those of Angelina Torres, Carme Noguera or Maria Branyas, who was the oldest person in the worldCentenarians are becoming increasingly common. In fact, this year Catalonia has surpassed 3,000 centenarians for the first time, according to the latest population estimates from the Statistical Institute of Catalonia (Idescat). Their numbers have been steadily increasing since the 1980s, a further indication of the progressive aging of the population, sinceThe number of people over 100 years old practically doubles every decadeWhile the population under 15 is declining, this trend has remained stable since 2018: the young population is shrinking, and the other age groups are increasing, especially those over 65. In 1985, there were 185 people in Catalonia aged 100 or older; by 1995, this number had risen to 370, and in the following decades, the increase accelerated even further: 815 in 2005 and 2 in 2015. The rate of increase hasn't been the same in the last decade, but the number has still risen by about a thousand, and the vast majority are women, like Angelina, Carmen, and María.