Keyword – Global development
Trefwoorden – Global development, Colombia, Older people, World news, Society, Americas, Global health, Ageing, Science, Cities and development, Cities, Social care
Title – ‘In parks you only see dogs, never children’: can Bogotá adapt to its ageing population? | Global development | The Guardian
Author – Claire McQue
Link – ‘In parks you only see dogs, never children’: can Bogotá adapt to its ageing population? | Global development | The Guardian
Publish date – 2026-09-08T10:00:01.000Z
Category – News
URL – https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/sep/08/bogota-colombia-ageing-population-demographics-children-health-social-care
F rom his wheelchair, Alberto Delgado Londoño can see over the wall of the sunlit courtyard towards the mountains east of Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. The 74-year-old lives in a care home for destitute elderly people, which opened at the end of last year.
Social workers found him in hospital, where he was being treated for throat cancer and a head injury that left him partly paralysed. “I had nowhere to go,” he says. “My daughter couldn’t take me in because she’s a single mother, she already has two children.”
Delgado Londoño is one of a growing number of Bogotanos with nowhere to turn in old age – an estimated 1,100 elderly people in the city are homeless , without families to care for them. To reach this vulnerable group, Bogotá unveiled a plan last year to integrate its social care and health systems.
“We have to be a society that knows how to care for its adults,” says Gerson Bermont Galavis, Bogotá’s health secretary. This means overhauling healthcare, social care and employment, requiring “a totally different city”, he says.
The capital’s population peaked this year at about 7.9 million ; it is forecast to start shrinking from 2027. Nearly 16% of its residents are aged over 60 , with the number projected to reach nearly 20% by 2035 , according to Bogotá’s Health Observatory.
Meanwhile, the old-age dependency ratio across Colombia is projected to double from 20.6% in 2025 to 42% by 2070 , according to modelling by the country’s central bank. That means fewer taxpayers to foot the bill for public pensions and support a healthcare system already under strain from a national funding crisis.
As people live longer and birthrates fall, the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) notes that “the ageing process in the region is occurring faster than in other regions of the world” . By 2050, the UN projects that nearly one in five people will be over the age of 65 , up from one in 11 in 2020. Bogotá is not yet the oldest city in the region, but the sudden slump in its birthrate suggests it could soon match other South American capitals, such as Buenos Aires, Santiago and Montevideo.
Bogotá’s total fertility rate – the average number of children a woman is likely to have over her lifetime – is lower than Tokyo’s, at 0.82 in 2025. Nationally, the rate has also fallen sharply – down to 1.6 children for every woman in 2024, from 6.7 in 1960. It is far below the replacement rate of 2.1 required to maintain a stable population.
“In the parks you only see dogs, you never see children,” says Juliana Jaramillo, an economist who studies demography at Colombia’s central bank.
“But it’s really difficult for a government to reduce the cost of having a child,” she adds. “Instead of trying to reverse the trend, you have to adapt to a new scenario.”
The city is already adjusting to the demographic change. Nursery enrolment in Bogotá fell by 13% between 2019 and 2023, the steepest drop in the country, and 287 schools , mostly private, closed in the capital between 2019 and 2024.
“We have a city that is ageing very rapidly, and we’re not responding quickly enough,” says Dr Manuel González, who designs Bogotá’s health policy. Increased longevity means more people enduring unhealthy and lonely lives, he says. “We are spending 10 years of our lives in ill health.”
While increasing the birthrate is hard, the city is focusing on boosting “healthy life” expectancy and changing how the capital thinks about growing old.
At the heart of this attempt to rethink ageing is San Juan de Dios, a 100-year-old hospital complex in Bogotá’s historic centre, close to Colombia’s leading institutes for oncology, dermatology and neonatal care. It closed in 2001 amid a funding crisis, but the constitutional court subsequently declared it a site of national heritage and ordered that its 24 buildings be restored. Eleven are now being renovated.
The 16-hectare (40-acre) hospital campus that is being created will encompass centres for youth and mental health but also residential care for older people, health and research facilities, rewilded gardens and a cultural centre, costing about 4tn pesos (£940m) to restore.
“It’s being conceived of as a miniature city,” says González. “But the way it operated 100 years ago is no longer what we need.”
He thinks San Juan de Dios should work as an intergenerational model of healthcare, spanning birth to old age. In March, the Centre for Thought and Innovation on Ageing opened in the hospital’s old laundry. It will advise Bogotá and the surrounding region on preventive care, chronic diseases and disability management. At a new training centre, caregivers can learn practical skills, from managing catheters to transferring patients into wheelchairs.
“In Latin American countries like Colombia, caregiving has always fallen on households … and mainly on women,” says Paola Camelo Urrego, of the University of the Andes. In Bogotá, women devote nearly five hours a day to unpaid care and multigenerational homes are becoming less common, meaning fewer family members to help with dependents.
In 2020, Bogotá’s former mayor Claudia López opened “care blocks” , where caregivers can drop off a toddler or an elderly parent for a few hours. This network of 20 community centres also teaches people to live healthier, more independent lives. Inside one, a boisterous group of over-65s learn to use WhatsApp. Afterwards, they may learn English or how to repair a motorbike.
These centres have given caregivers greater recognition, says Camelo Urrego, but they have not redistributed who does the grandparent duties. “Women get home to find nothing has changed.”
“Loneliness really gets to me,” says Don Jorge, a 76-year-old who has recently recovered from a bout of tuberculosis. He rarely receives visitors in the nursing home and he misses having someone to confide in.
To reduce social isolation, the city has begun prescribing culture and nature-based activities. Instead of getting pills to cure their ills, patients can take part in activities such as visits to the botanic gardens, traditional marketplaces or community-run gardening. Last December, a gran baile mayor (seniors’ grand ball) drew about 4,500 older people who danced to live salsa at the city’s Movistar Arena.
Equally vital is changing how people think about ageing. “We can’t think of people over 50 as grandparents,” says María del Pilar López Uribe, Bogotá’s economic development secretary. “The problem isn’t finding people over 50 who want to work, it’s finding companies willing to take a chance on them.”
The city offers short courses to retrain older workers. Companies hiring workers over 50 receive a bonus, with an additional payout if the worker is retained. In time, other measures such as raising the retirement age may be needed. Colombian men now generally retire at 62 and women at 57, while average life expectancy is about 78 .
As it is, the city can scarcely afford to pay for more pensioners. Bogotá’s GDP per capita was less than £10,500 in 2024, about a fifth of Tokyo’s. Colombia’s high inequality compounds the problem. About a third of workers in the capital operate informally, meaning a financially precarious old age is likely. Just 17% of retired women in Bogotá have a pension, and 29% of men.
Yet Jaramillo says Bogotá’s demographic trajectory is not set in stone. Most Colombian women have their babies aged between 20 and 29 – 10 years earlier than in developed countries, making the issue of fertility less pressing.
“That puts us in a very different position to Japan and the US, where policymakers might be worrying about how women can have children,” she says.
Meanwhile, Delgado Londoño remains upbeat about the future, despite his problems. “I’m working on a collection of poems,” he says, pulling out his phone to reveal a 100-verse poem about an arriero (muleteer) plodding through Colombia’s coffee region. “I keep writing.”