While active modes are mentioned as a solution to decarbonise the mobility sector in cities of the global North, most people living in Latin American metropolises outskirts already widely travel walking and cycling. Our contribution aims at fuelling the debate about contemporary forms of mobility in the popular peripheries of global South metropolises, by displaying the difficulties for the residents of Bogotá’s neighborhood El Rincón (Colombia) to move daily on foot and by bicycle. Using an ethnographic approach of active mobilities, we evidence the mismatches between the quality of traffic spaces and such forms of mobility, and the strategies and tactics of walking and cycling used by people we interviewed in and around Bogotá's densest popular periphery.