‘In parks you only see dogs, never children’: can Bogotá adapt to its ageing population?

With a lower fertility rate than Tokyo and the number of pensioners rapidly rising, Colombia’s capital is being forced to change the way it thinks about growing old

From 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.”