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Angelina Torres dies aged 112, the woman who saw the Sagrada Família being built and lived through three centuries
When Angelina Torres was born in March 1913, cars were not yet on every street, telephones were not in every home, and sound cinema did not exist. More than a century later, she has died in Barcelona aged 112, as Catalonia’s oldest woman and one of the 40 longest-lived people on the planet, according to the Gerontology Research Group.
Her life was a bridge between eras. She was born in Bellvís (Pla d’Urgell), the daughter of a barber and a housewife who, after being widowed, emigrated with seven children to the Catalan capital. There, at a small school run by the Salesian Sisters, Angelina learned to read in the morning and sew in the afternoon. She lived through hard times, but she also saw a modern country being born.
She had the memory of another age. In an interview with Agència Catalana de Notícies, she recalled speaking with the workers who were building the foundations of the Sagrada Familia. “I asked them what they were doing,” she said with a smile. “They told me: ‘A church that Catalonia will be proud of’.” And she said it with the calm of someone who had seen that promise fulfilled.
“The doctors have had little to do with me,” she joked when explaining her longevity. Perhaps it was genetic — her mother lived almost a century — or perhaps the secret lay in her philosophy: “Live calmly, without getting angry, without rushing.”
The President of the Generalitat, Salvador Illa, bade her farewell as “a wise, hardworking woman full of kindness”. And he was not wrong. Torres was a discreet witness to everything that changed the world: from the world wars to television, from man's arrival on the Moon to the rise of artificial intelligence.
Today, Catalonia has more than 3,000 centenarians, but few like her can say they were born when the 20th century was only a promise. With Angelina Torres's death, a centenarian voice is extinguished, but her example remains: a simple, immense life full of history. A life that, in some way, contains all the others.