["Population, Space and Place, Volume 32, Issue 6, August 2026. ", "\nABSTRACT\nHow do older adults reshape the spatial demography of a middle‐income country undergoing one of the fastest population‐ageing transitions on record? Brazil offers a particularly informative case: its share of population aged 60 or above rose from 6.2% in 1980 to 10.8% in 2010 and is projected to reach 25% by 2050, and a nationally administered pension regime makes benefits fully portable across the country's 5565 municipalities. Using large‐sample microdata from four Brazilian Demographic Censuses (1980–2010, 84 million records harmonised to 4298 stable comparable areas) linked to municipal economic accounts, we document a senior counter‐current with the hallmarks of counter‐urbanisation. Senior inter‐area mobility declines with age yet remains substantial through retirement ages, and it is not local boundary‐hopping: the median senior move covers roughly 100 kilometres and nearly a third crosses state lines. Older Brazilians move against the working‐age tide—the largest metropolitan areas lose retirees on net, while small and medium‐sized interior destinations receive them at rates reaching 5%–6% of initial population per 5‐year window. Receiving areas expand demographically—in total population, working‐age cohorts, employment, housing stock and services activity—but GDP per capita and agricultural value added grow more slowly, a pattern consistent with retirees transmitting purchasing power to destinations whose productive base does not scale with the inflow. These associations are robust to geographic‐amenity controls, pre‐trend conditioning and microregion fixed effects and geographically weighted regressions show they hold across virtually the entire national territory; we are explicit, however, that positive selection of destinations bounds them above any causal effect. We discuss what the Brazilian counter‐current implies for population geography and for other middle‐income countries tracing the same demographic curve.\n"]