The Community That Refuses to Die

I. The Culture That Fights Back

Every Sunday in Bogotá, over 120 kilometres of streets go car-free. One to two million people — approximately 20 to 25 percent of the city's population — pour out to cycle, jog, skate, and walk. They have been doing this for 50 years, since 1974. The Ciclovía has inspired more than 400 cities globally to create similar programmes.

This is not a fitness event. It is a cultural statement. In Latin America, community is not an amenity. It is an identity.

Familismo — the core cultural value emphasising loyalty, reciprocity, and solidarity among family members — extends well beyond the nuclear family to include extended kin, compadres, and close friends. The extended family provides emotional and practical safety nets: financial assistance, childcare, housing. Individuals carry a moral responsibility to aid family members experiencing unemployment, poor health, or hardship.

Plaza culture, public gatherings, celebrations like Nochebuena, Quinceañeras, Día de los Muertos — these are not traditions. They are infrastructure. Social infrastructure encoded into the culture at a level that no algorithm can easily dismantle.

And that is precisely what is being tested.

II. The Pressure

Latin America is the most urbanised developing region in the world — 81.2 percent of the population lives in urban areas, projected to reach 89 to 90 percent by 2050. Urbanisation at this density fractures the extended family structures that defined Latin American life.

Social media saturation is accelerating the fracture. TikTok reached approximately 270.7 million monthly active users in Latin America by 2025. Brazil alone saw over 7 million Reels published daily in Q1 2025. Over 77 percent of Chile's population is on social media. The digital is replacing the physical plaza as the primary site of social interaction — and it is a poor substitute.

Fifty percent of Brazilians report feeling lonely often, always, or sometimes — among the highest rates globally, according to Ipsos research. Fifty-two percent said they had become lonelier during the pandemic.

Youth unemployment stands at 12.5 to 13.2 percent across the region — almost three times the adult rate. Among young workers, 56 percent are in informal employment. The NEET rate — Not in Education, Employment, or Training — is 25.9 percent for young women and 13.5 percent for young men. Nearly a quarter of young women in Latin America have nowhere to go — no job, no school, no training programme.

The World Bank projects that between 26 and 38 percent of jobs in Latin America and the Caribbean are exposed to generative AI, with 1 to 6 percent facing high risk of full automation. But here is the demographic paradox: the workers most exposed are women, urban, younger, non-poor, formally employed, and better-educated — the opposite of traditional automation patterns. AI in Latin America threatens the professional class, the very group that has most successfully integrated into modern economic life.

III. The Fitness Explosion

Brazil is the world's second-largest gym market by number of facilities — approximately 29,500 to 34,000 health clubs serving 9.6 million members. The market is growing at over 9 percent annually. Brazil commands a 52.66 percent market share of the entire South American fitness market. Among active Brazilians, nearly 80 percent hold gym memberships — the highest in the region.

Smart Fit — founded in Brazil, now Latin America's largest gym chain — has 5.5 million active members across 1,743 facilities in 15 countries. Monthly memberships are priced at $15 to $25, making fitness accessible to demographics traditionally excluded. The company plans to open 340 to 360 new gyms in 2025 alone. Annual revenue grew 31 percent to $930 million in 2024.

Mexico's gym market totals $2.1 billion in revenue, growing at 6.5 percent annually. Smart Fit added 81,000 new members in Mexico in January 2025 alone. Argentina has the highest gym membership penetration rate in Latin America, with a market growing at 10 percent annually. Colombia's market grows at 8.9 percent, supported by government guidelines recommending 150 minutes of moderate exercise weekly.

Across the region, 61 percent of urban Latin Americans exercise at least twice a week. Fifty-five percent prefer gyms and studios as their exercise space. Top motivations: general health at 44 percent, mental and emotional wellbeing at 42 percent, self-confidence at 36 percent.

The motivations are telling. Mental and emotional wellbeing — not aesthetics, not performance — is the second most cited reason for exercise in Latin America. People are coming to gyms not to look better but to feel better. To feel connected.

IV. The Street as Gym

Latin America has something most regions do not: a deeply embedded tradition of public, outdoor, communal fitness.

Bogotá's Ciclovía is the most famous example, but it is not unique. Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and Brazil all offer widespread free and low-cost public fitness classes. Colombia, Chile, Venezuela, and El Salvador run mass participation yoga classes in public squares and parks. Across six Latin American countries, 42.8 percent cite outdoor activities — cycling, running, swimming — as their most popular form of exercise. Nearly 19 percent specifically value the sense of community in outdoor exercise.

The streets emerged as the most common place for physical activity in Latin American cities. Informal, non-designated spaces — not gyms, not parks — are important contributors to physical activity. Community fitness in Latin America is not confined to commercial spaces. It is embedded in everyday public life.

This is the cultural advantage. The infrastructure of belonging is not locked behind a monthly subscription. It is in the plaza, the park, the Sunday street closure. When you build fitness culture on a foundation of public communal activity, you create a market that grows from the bottom up.

V. The Community That Refuses to Die

Here is the data point that defines Latin America's position in the global belonging crisis.

During the pandemic, as loneliness rose globally, something unusual happened in Latin America. In Mexico, 40 percent of people reported their local community becoming more supportive. In Peru, 44 percent. In Chile, 43 percent. In Argentina, 38 percent.

Loneliness increased. And community support simultaneously increased.

This is not a contradiction. It is a cultural response. Research published in Perspectives on Psychological Science found that Latin American societies emphasise collectivist values as strongly as East Asian societies while also fostering independent self-construal as strongly as Western societies. Latin America exists outside the cultural binary — neither purely individualist nor purely collectivist. People freely choose their social bonds rather than being bound by inherited ones, making those bonds more intentional and more resilient.

When atomisation threatens, Latin American cultures do not passively succumb. They actively counteract. Community is not a default. It is a choice, remade every day, in the plaza, at the gym, on the Ciclovía.

VI. The Blueprint

Latin America offers the rest of the world something no other region can: a blueprint for how belonging survives the algorithm age.

The region demonstrates that communal cultures can absorb digital pressure without collapsing — that community support can increase even as loneliness does. It proves that fitness can be public, affordable, and culturally embedded — that $15 memberships and Sunday street closures can build belonging infrastructure at scale. It shows that outdoor, communal exercise is not a nice-to-have but a core social institution.

Smart Fit's model — affordable, accessible, Latin American-born — is now in 15 countries with 5.5 million members. Bogotá's Ciclovía model is in 400 cities worldwide. The blueprint is already being exported.

The belonging crisis is global. But the response doesn't have to look the same everywhere. In Latin America, the community refuses to die. It adapts, it fights back, it shows up on Sunday mornings by the million.

The fitness industry in Latin America is not just a market. It is a cultural institution — and it is proving that human connection is harder to automate than anyone predicted.

The algorithm wants you alone. Latin America says no.

Your Community Already Knows How

If you operate in Latin America, you have a cultural advantage that no other region possesses: your members already understand belonging. The plaza, the Ciclovía, the Sunday gathering — community is not something you need to teach. It is something you need to harness. Your facility sits within a culture that actively fights for connection.

Smart Fit proved that affordable, accessible fitness can scale across the continent. The blueprint is yours to build on. The operators who channel Latin America’s communal instinct into deliberate belonging infrastructure will lead the region — and offer the rest of the world a model worth following.