The first weekend of Argentina’s winter school holidays brought a chill off the South Atlantic and a quiet that unsettled the coastal city of Mar del Plata. On Friday, the hotel association reported occupancy at just 25 per cent, a figure its vice-president, Hernán Szkrohal, attributed partly to the distraction of the World Cup final and partly to a growing habit of last-minute bookings. The weather forecast offered a sliver of hope: a Sunday high of 16°C, skies mostly clear, the kind of day that might coax families from Buenos Aires to make the four-hour drive. “The movement could improve from Wednesday,” Szkrohal told local radio, his voice carrying the cautious optimism of a sector that has learned to read the sky and the calendar in equal measure.

That caution is echoed in kitchens and living rooms across the country. Financial specialists in Argentina have been urging families to set a strict holiday budget before the school break begins, to seek out municipal cultural events with free admission, and to use cinema promotions to contain costs. One Spanish financial educator, writing in an Argentine outlet, suggested that households earning €30,000 a year should allocate between €1,500 and €3,000 to holidays—no more than 10 per cent of annual income—and automate savings into a separate account to avoid the “mental trap” of borrowing from oneself. In Brazil, where central bank data showed household debt at its highest since 2023, advisers stress the distinction between long-term financial planning and the monthly budget, a discipline that turns the abstract desire for a holiday into a line item.

Yet the season’s anxieties are not only economic. Across continents, cyber police units have issued alerts about a surge in phishing schemes tailored to travellers. In Mexico City, the police cyber unit warned of fake Java-based pop-up windows that mimic WhatsApp’s interface to steal verification codes, a technique that allows criminals to hijack accounts and then solicit money from contacts. Russian security researchers described fraudulent copies of airline and booking websites, often differing by a single letter in the domain, that vanish after payment. Argentine tourism authorities, meanwhile, cautioned against rental scams on social media, where fraudsters lure victims with improbably low prices and then pressure them into bank transfers outside secure platforms. The common thread is a predator’s instinct for the moment when guard drops and desire for a break overrides suspicion.

In Mar del Plata, the counterweight to these pressures is a deliberately free cultural calendar. At the Casa sobre el Arroyo, the modernist house turned museum, children aged four to twelve are invited to explore the grounds through games and collective art, while a storyteller weaves tales under the trees on Tuesdays and Fridays. A few blocks from the seafront, the Teatro Auditorium opens its doors each afternoon for “A Desaburrir el Invierno”—a kermesse of circus, theatre, and comic workshops where tickets are handed out, gratis, from 10 a.m. on the day of the show. The queues form early, parents clutching thermoses of mate, children bundled in puffer jackets, the ritual of waiting itself a small act of defiance against the cold and the cost of everything else.

On a Tuesday morning, with the temperature hovering near 8°C, a group of children sat on wooden benches by the creek as the narrator Mariela Kogan began a story. The sound of the water mixed with her voice, and for a moment the empty hotel rooms and the phishing links and the spreadsheets of household debt receded. What remained was a scene repeated in parks and theatres across the country that winter: families stitching together a holiday from the free and the nearby, finding warmth not in the sun but in the shared act of imagination.