Ten Ways To Meet People Over 60 In Argentina

The hard part about meeting people after 60 is rarely shyness. It is that the places which used to do the introducing for you have quietly closed. Work ended. The children grew up and moved out, or moved to another province. Friends became couples, or widows, or moved to be nearer their grandchildren. Nobody hands you a new circle at this age. You have to go and stand in one.

The good news is that Argentina is unusually well set up for this, and most of it costs little or nothing. Here are ten places to start.

• 1. Your centro de jubilados

  Start here, because it is the closest thing this country has to a ready-made social circle for people our age, and there is almost certainly one within walking distance. Every barrio has one. So does every small town. They run gimnasia and yoga in the morning, memory workshops, card games, tea afternoons, choir practice, day trips, and a good deal of sitting about talking, which is the part that actually matters.

  Some people put off going because the name sounds like a waiting room. It is not. The centro near you is more likely to be a converted house with a kitchen at the back, a noticeboard by the door and somebody arguing about the coffee. Walk in and ask what is on this week. You do not need an appointment and you do not need to know anyone.

• 2. A PAMI taller

  If you have a PAMI credential, and most of us do, the talleres are free and there are more of them than people realise. Yoga, tai chi, gimnasia, painting, ceramics, theatre, singing, memory work. They are mostly run through the centros de jubilados, which means you get the class and the social circle in the same building.

  You can browse what is running at pami.org.ar, but the more reliable method is the Argentine one: go to the centro, look at the paper on the wall, and ask the woman behind the desk. She will know things the website does not.

• 3. A UPAMI course

  This one is genuinely underused. UPAMI puts PAMI members into free courses at more than sixty national universities, in person or online, with no requirement to have studied before. Argentine history, music appreciation, photography, languages, computing. Real courses at real universities, taught properly, and they cost nothing.

  A course beats a party for meeting people, because you turn up to the same room, with the same faces, every week for a term. By week four you are not strangers. Enrolment opens once per cuatrimestre, roughly February and again in July or August, and places go quickly.

• 4. The plaza

  It is free, it is five minutes away, and half your neighbourhood is already there. This is not a romantic idea about Argentine life, it is just what the plaza is for. Go at the same time on the same days and you will start recognising people, and they will start recognising you. That is how most friendships at our age actually begin, slowly and by repetition.

  Several municipalities put activity into the plazas as well. In the Ciudad, Plazas Activas runs free outdoor exercise and dance classes across the barrios. Plenty of towns in the interior do something similar in the summer evenings. Ask at the municipalidad or look at their Facebook page, which in most towns is more current than the website.

• 5. A choir

  Unglamorous and very effective. Choirs need people, they rehearse weekly, they take absolutely anyone, and nobody minds if you have not sung since school. You spend an hour standing shoulder to shoulder with the same group, then most of them go for coffee afterwards, which is the real reason to join.

  Look at your centro de jubilados, the municipal cultural centre, and the parish. Between them, most towns have at least one.

• 6. Dancing, whatever they dance where you live

  Worth being honest about this. If you are in the Ciudad, the milongas are real and there are milongas for people our age, some of them free. But dancing in Argentina is not tango and nothing else. In Córdoba it is cuarteto. In the Litoral it is chamamé. Folklore is everywhere, and in a good many places a folklore afternoon is easier to walk into alone than a milonga is, because there is less etiquette to trip over and you are not expected to arrive knowing the codes.

  Whatever the music, the point stands: dancing is one of the very few settings where a single person over 60 can turn up on their own and be expected to partner with people they have never met. That is rare, and it is worth using.

• 7. Volunteering

  Nothing puts you among people faster than being useful alongside them. PAMI runs Abuelos Leecuentos, where volunteers read to children in schools, and Raíces y Retoños, which is community gardening. The Fundación Navarro Viola runs Voluntariado +60 with two intakes a year and training included, in cycles running April to July and August to November. Cáritas takes volunteers almost everywhere. The Ciudad runs Generación Plateada for over-60s.

  The people you meet doing this tend to be the sort who turn up, which is a decent filter.

• 8. The feria

  Every town has its market day. Go on foot, go to the same stalls, and talk to the people running them. This sounds like nothing, but a stallholder who knows your name is a small anchor in the week, and the ferias de artesanos in particular attract a lot of people over 60 who are there as much for the morning out as for the shopping.

  If you have something to sell, so much the better. Plenty of people our age have taken a taller in ceramics or knitting and ended up with a table.

• 9. A trip

  PAMI runs turismo and miniturismo for members: Mar del Plata, Carlos Paz, Bariloche, Mendoza, the sierras, the termas in Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires. Accommodation, full board, organised activities, staff who know how to look after a group of this age. A partner can usually come along even if they are not a member, at a different rate.

  Four days away with the same forty people does more for your address book than four months of good intentions. You need a fitness certificate and up to date vaccinations, and the places go fast, so ask at your PAMI office or ring 138 well before you want to travel.

• 10. Online dating

  Everything above will widen your circle. Only this one is specifically for finding a partner, which is a different thing and worth naming honestly. At a taller or a choir you are hoping that somebody single, roughly your age and interested turns up by chance. On a site like Singles Over 60 everybody has already said all three.

  If you use WhatsApp, you can use this. That is genuinely the level of difficulty. Nearly nine in ten Argentines over 60 have a smartphone now, and of the ones who stay off the internet, the most common reason given is not cost or lack of interest but simply not knowing how. It is worth pushing past that, because the alternative is waiting for chance, and chance has fewer opportunities than it used to.

When to start

Two moments in the Argentine year are better than the rest, and neither is the one a European calendar would suggest. Courses, talleres and volunteering cycles all restart at the end of February or in March, and again at the end of July or in August. Those are the weeks when a room is full of people who are also new and also do not know anybody.

January is the opposite. The centros wind down, UPAMI is out of session, the municipal workshops pause and anyone who can be at the coast is at the coast. If January is when you decide to do something about this, use it to look things up and sign up for March.

One last thing. Do not try all ten. Pick one, go three times before you decide whether you like it, and let the second thing arrive through somebody you met at the first. That is how it usually goes.

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