Spain still has second-highest life expectancy in the world

The average life expectancy for a newborn Spaniard in 2016 was 83.2 years, making Spain the country with the second-highest life expectancy in the world after Japan, according to new OECD statistics…

While a Japanese can expect to live slightly longer – 83.4 years – nowhere else in the world offers a better chance of reaching a ripe old age than Spain, which has long been one of the world’s healthiest nations, ranking second in 2015 and third in 2014.

According to the OECD census,Spain now has more than 100,000 people aged 100 or over, and to mark the publication of the data news agency Reuters sent a photographer to Spain to interview a handful of the country’s centenarians and find out the secrets to a long and healthy life.

Their responses ranged from the standard answers – love, laugh and eat well – to the, shall we say, more eye-raising methods. Pedro Rodríguez, a 106-year-old from Asturias, swears by music as the secret to his longevity, telling photographer Andrea Comas that he has played the piano almost every day since first learning as a child.

Francisco Núñez, a 112-year-old from Badajoz, still lives at home with his 81-year-old daughter after giving the local pensioners’ daycare centre the cold shoulder because “it’s full of old people”, while Gumersindo Cubo, 101 from Ávila, reckons that a childhood spent exploring the local woods equipped him with the fortitude to live past 100.

“It’s from inhaling the pine resin from the woods where I lived as a child,” said Cubo. “My mother used to put a jar of the resin under the bed when I was sick.”

As Comas points out, all of the people he interviewed had a very strong support network of friends and family close by – a not-insignificant reason why they had all reached a grand old age. Spain’s family-first approach to life – mirrored in Japan – has long been seen as one of the chief reasons why its people live longer lives. Loneliness is a big killer in western societies, but as people age in Spain, ties seem to bond thicker, rather than loosen.

That, and the fact that Spain’s famously varied, fresh and healthy Mediterranean diet keeps its populace trim and fighting fit, while the country’s more leisurely lifestyle and warm, welcoming climate also plays a huge role in nurturing a society that will outlast almost all others.