QCOSTARICA – José Uriel Delgado Corrales, known as Chepito, died this Thursday night, confirmed the Home for the Hogar de Ancianos de Piedades de Santa Ana, in San José, where the man lived.
Chepito was 121 years old and the oldest Costa Rican in the country.
According to the director of the home for the elderly, Sister María Inés, Delgado Corrales died at 8:30 pm.
“He has been in this process for about a month. He has been accompanied, we have taken care of him, but it is a normal process of wear and tear of an organism that was already 121 years old,” she indicated.
Chepito has lived in the Santa Ana home for the last 27 years, becoming his home and where he shared daily with other older adults. He was found living on the streets in Tibás, and not much is known about his past.
He was born at 10 pm on March 10, 1900. He was baptized in the San Miguel de Escazú parish on the 12th of the same month and year.
He was the son of Jesús Delgado Herrero and Gabriela Corrales Madrigal.
He never married and had no children (at least officially registered in the civil registry). This was confirmed by genealogist Mauricio Meléndez in a work that he published on his website about the family history of Chepito.
The stories about Chepito place him as a native of Escazcú, they also say that he lived for some years in San Ignacio de Acosta. He arrived in Santa Ana when he was already an older adult and that he previously worked as a laborer.
His father was a farmer and, as was very common in those days, he married a close relative at a young age.
“Another of the relatively frequent characteristics in Costa Rican families prior to 1950 is the marriage between neighbors and relatives (consanguinity), which causes a person to descend from the same couple several times. Thus, Chepito’s father and mother were related since they were both great-grandchildren of Eusebio Delgado Aguilar and Mercedes León Cascante, who had married in Escazú in 1822,” explains Meléndez in his work.
Chepito, although he was 120 years old, did not hold the record for the oldest person in the world, this due to procedural issues that could not be rectified with the Guinness World Records authorities.
Officials from the Hogar de Ancianos de Piedades de Santa Ans affirmed that they tried to carry out the process for the Guinness record and that they complied with the procedure, but that the lack of documentation on Chepito’s life complicated the resolution.
Due to his age and the fact that he lived in a nursing home, Chepito was vaccinated against COVID-19 at the beginning of the campaign. On February 9, he had received the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine.
Read our articles on Chepito over the years:
- ‘Chepito’ turns 121: why is he not in the Guinness Records?
- Chepito, the oldest Tico in the country, gets his second dose of the covid vaccine
- “Chepito”, at 120, Costa Rica’s oldest gets vaccinated
- Chepito Celebrated his 119th! (Photos & Video)
- The “Oldest Man In The World” Could Be Living Right Here in Costa Rica
- Living Beyond 100
