MADRID: A Spanish village on Tuesday declared a day of mourning following the death of a retired farmer billed as “the world’s oldest man,” who passed away just over a month after turning 113.
Francisco Nunez Olivera, who was 10 years old when World War I broke out, died on Monday in the village of Bienvenida in southwestern Spain where he had lived throughout his life, village mayor Antonio Carmona told AFP.
“It’s a very cold day and most of all a very sad day,” Carmona said.
Born on December 13, 1904, relatives credited Nunez Olivera’s long life to a diet based on vegetables he grew on his own land and a daily glass of red wine.
Every morning for breakfast, he would have sponge cake made with olive oil and a glass of milk. And until the age of 107, he went out for daily walks by himself, according to Spanish media reports published when he celebrated his last birthday.
While the Spanish media described Nunez Olivera as the world’s oldest man, his name did not appear on a list kept by the Gerontology Research Group, which validates the ages of the world’s longest-living people.
The US-based group lists Japan’s Masazou Nonaka, born on July 25, 1905 making him 112, as the world’s oldest man but Carmona said there were documents to prove the Spaniard was in fact older.
It also lists a Japanese woman, aged 117, as the world’s oldest person.
“We were in the process of applying for him to enter into the Guinness Book of World Records. It meant a lot to his neighbors to be represented by the oldest man in the world,” Carmona said.
Proving Nunez Olivera’s exact age has been complicated by the fact that most of Bienvenida’s public archives were destroyed during Spain’s 1936-39 civil war, according to newspaper El Mundo.
Nunez Olivera, known in the village as Marchena due to his likeness to a Spanish flamenco singer who used that stage name, had been a widower since 1988.
He fought in the Rif War in the first half of the 1920s between Spain and the Berber tribes of the Rif mountains in Morocco and survived General Francisco Franco’s 1936-75 dictatorship.
On Tuesday afternoon, he was set to be buried in Bienvenida.
He was one of 32 people over the age of 90 among the roughly 2,200 inhabitants of the village, according to El Mundo.
Spain has one of the highest life expectancies in the world, which doctors often attribute to the country’s Mediterranean diet.
'World’s oldest man' dies in Spain aged 113
'World’s oldest man' dies in Spain aged 113
Three-year heatwave bleached half the planet’s coral reefs: study
PARIS: A study published on Tuesday showed that more than half of the world’s coral reefs were bleached between 2014-2017 — a record-setting episode now being eclipsed by another series of devastating heatwaves.
The analysis concluded that 51 percent of the world’s reefs endured moderate or worse bleaching while 15 percent experienced significant mortality over the three-year period known as the “Third Global Bleaching Event.”
It was “by far the most severe and widespread coral bleaching event on record,” said Sean Connolly, one the study’s authors and a senior scientist at the Panama-based Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
“And yet, reefs are currently experiencing an even more severe Fourth Event, which started in early 2023,” Connolly said in a statement.
When the sea overheats, corals eject the microscopic algae that provides their distinct color and food source.
Unless ocean temperatures return to more tolerable levels, bleached corals are unable to recover and eventually die of starvation.
“Our findings demonstrate that the impacts of ocean warming on coral reefs are accelerating, with the near certainty that ongoing warming will cause large-scale, possibly irreversible, degradation of these essential ecosystems,” said the study in the journal Nature Communications.
An international team of scientists analyzed data from more than 15,000 in-water and aerial surveys of reefs around the world over the 2014-2017 period.
They combined the data with satellite-based heat stress measurements and used statistical models to estimate how much bleaching occurred around the world.
No time to recover
The two previous global bleaching events, in 1998 and 2010, had lasted one year.
“2014-17 was the first record of a global coral bleaching event lasting much beyond a single year,” the study said.
“Ocean warming is increasing the frequency, extent, and severity of tropical-coral bleaching and mortality.”
Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, for instance, saw peak heat stress increase each year between 2014 and 2017.
“We are seeing that reefs don’t have time to recover properly before the next bleaching event occurs,” said Scott Heron, professor of physics at James Cook University in Australia.
A major scientific report last year warned that the world’s tropical coral reefs have likely reached a “tipping point” — a shift that could trigger massive and often permanent changes in the natural world.
The global scientific consensus is that most coral reefs would perish at warming of 1.5C above preindustrial levels — the ambitious, long-term limit countries agreed to pursue under the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Global temperatures exceeded 1.5C on average between 2023-2025, the European Union’s climate monitoring service, Copernicus, said last month.
“We are only just beginning to analyze bleaching and mortality observations from the current bleaching event,” Connolly told AFP.
“However the overall level of heat stress was extraordinarily high, especially in 2023-2024, comparable to or higher than what was observed in 2014-2017, at least in some regions,” he said.
He said the Pacific coastline of Panama experienced “dramatically worse heat stress than they had ever experienced before, and we observed considerable coral mortality.”
