There are five specific zones in the world where people live exceptionally long, for hundreds of years even with the lack of availability of good quality and equal resources. Among them is Jose Flores, who was born 119 years ago, according to Costa Rica’s civil registry, was born on July 11, 1907, to a woman named Josefa in the province of Guanacaste, on the country’s north Pacific coast.Everyone born in that first decade of the 20th century and many who were born years later are no more. But Flores still lives in good health in a rural municipality located on the edge of a ‘blue zone’. Flores is strong, lives with a smile on his face and active muscles, he sleeps and eats well, but resides in a poor, rural household where he is cared for by his family.According to a report by El País, he is the oldest person in Costa Rica and possibly on the planet, a record that his relatives are trying to process with the help of local organisations and a Spanish researcher who calls Flores “an absolutely extraordinary case.”Currently, Flores lives in a wooden and sheet metal house located in the village of Obandito de Sardinal, in the hot municipality of Carrillo, near the Nicoya Peninsula. He returned to the village in 2024, after nearly a century of leaving to work on banana plantations in the south of the country. He was born in another Guanacaste municipality, where his grandmother raised him after he was abandoned by his mother and lost his father at the age of seven.As a child, he learned to work in the fields and as a teenager, he migrated to earn his own money in the banana enclaves of the country in exchange for brutal working conditions. After marriage, he moved to the country’s north. At one point the State was going to allocate him a plot, but he was almost 75 and did not qualify because no one believed he would be able to work it, his granddaughter recalls with a laugh. Now they live in precarious conditions despite various promises of decent housing never being fulfilled.He is a local celebrity and greets people who come to meet him with a strong handshake and a genuine smile. He has trouble with hearing and suffers from knee wear, says he feels “worn and blunt” and compares himself to a dull machete. He is taken care of by his granddaughter who is attending courses for eldercare since she has discovered a calling and possibly an employment opportunity. “Many people see grandparents as furniture; they feed them and clean them, but they are not always seen as people with full rights. Here, [José] has the final say over his belongings,” says the granddaughter, who decided to take charge of his care despite not having a fixed income. The family receives about 150,000 colones a month (about $330), one-eighth of the average household income in the country.
The secret to longevity
“Work a lot, entrust yourself to God and eat healthy,” he said to the outlet. “I can say he reflects that functional lifestyle of the region: family and community networks, organic food, constant physical activity and the calm of a simple life, a routine marked by sunlight, a spirituality tied to religion… It’s a mix of many things,” said Jorge Vindas, founder of the Península de Nicoya Blue Zone Association.The group promotes and protects this part of Guanacaste as a region with a high presence of centenarians, as recorded 20 years ago by American researcher Dan Buettner when he launched an international project that includes other blue zones such as Loma Linda in California, Sardinia in Italy, Ikaria in Greece and the Japanese island of Okinawa.Flores, however, is not a product of Guanacaste’s blue zone. He has largely followed the region’s lifestyle where for generations people ate without consuming any processed foods. “There are many ingredients in this salad called longevity. Genetics, diet, physical activity… now we have added human relationships and social connection. But there is no definitive answer that explains everything, because other people in similar conditions have died at much younger ages,” said José Antonio Rabadán, PhD in Gerontology from the University of Alicante in Spain and a researcher of the Guanacaste region in Costa Rica, where he has made more than 70 visits to centenarians.“At 119 years there is no normal. These are cases we are only beginning to understand,” he said of the man who, at the age of 113, still walked a kilometre every day to meet other older adults at a daytime centre in the town where he then lived. Rabadan is optimistic about obtaining international certification for José. This is because the state registry is reliable, and he also has a copy of the baptismal record signed by Bishop Luis Leipod in 1907.He is confident of a response from the validating body, the Gerontology Research Group (GRG), a global organisation founded in the United States that registers and studies supercentenarians, people older than 110. After that, he might become a Guinness World Record holder, but he warns he prefers to take it step by step. So far the oldest living person is the Englishwoman Ethel Caterham, who will turn 117 on August 21, according to GRC data. As far as is known, the record is held by the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who reached 122 years and 164 days and died in 1997.
