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

Bogotá has launched a number of initiatives to tackle its ageing population. Women often retire at 57, when they can draw a pension, but life expectancy has risen to 78. Photograph: Bogotá health secretariat

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.”