Diana Gabaldón: "Thanks to the tricycle I run again"

Jump“I used to work here.” Diana Gabaldón (El Provencio, Cuenca, 1937) points to the old Coma Cros textile factory in Salt, now a cultural hub. By a twist of fate, she now lives opposite it, at the Les Vetes residence. She has left in a wheelchair and is getting onto the En Bici Sense Edat tricycle. It is an electric bicycle with a front bench designed for two people with reduced mobility to ride on. She is 89 years old and can no longer get around Salt on foot, by bike, or by moped, as she did when she was young, but thanks to this volunteering project, she is once again “running” – as she puts it – through the streets she discovered when she arrived from Cuenca at 18 years old.

From a very young age, she had learned to pedal her father's bike among the flax fields he cultivated. And when she went to work in Girona after serving in Madrid and Barcelona, it became the fastest means of transport between jobs in the 1950s. “I left the factory at five in the morning because I worked at night so I could also work during the day. And I would go from ten to four on the Barcelona road to do chores for a family,” she recalls while waving to a girl running past. “I slept as best I could in the afternoon because I lived in the shacks by the river, everything was very small, and there was always a lot of noise from people. I needed two jobs to pay the pension to my aunt, who had taken me in in Girona”.

An international project

The tricycle immediately leaves the streets of Salt behind and enters Les Hortes, following the Via Verda del Carrilet that leads to Olot and Sant Feliu de Guíxols. At the handlebars is Joseba Inchaustegui, a volunteer and coordinator of the project En Bici Sense Edat (On Bikes Without Age) in Girona. “I heard about it in 2024, I took the training course to ride, and from there I got hooked – he assures. The companionship, sharing the joy of the rides with the people who come, is engaging. That's priceless. While pedaling, we share things you don't share elsewhere.”

They have three tricycles and go out twice a week with elderly people from the Les Vetes residence. And in the last year they have also started to take walks in La Devesa with a group of children with physical and psychological disabilities from a special education center in Girona. Bici Sense Edat is an international movement born in 2012 in Copenhagen (Denmark), driven by social activist Ole Kassow. The idea arose after seeing an elderly person sitting alone on a bench and wondering how to give them back the pleasure of cycling. It began with rides on an adapted tricycle in a residence very close to the self-managed community of the Christiania neighborhood, from where the 4,500 tricycles now come, distributed among 3,700 local groups present in 56 countries. In the case of Catalonia, there are 15 municipalities developing this program.

We went out for a walk with three tricycles. Along the way, we see how the tomatoes in the garden are ripening, they explain to me that in the spring they saw the Frisian cow calves being born grazing in the meadows and we greeted the horses. The vegetation on the banks of the Ter protects us from this torrid summer and the spectacle reaches La Pilastra, on the border with Bescanó. Diana recalls that it is often full of children going down by canoe through the Parc d’Aigües Braves.

A journey in every sense

But beyond the landscape, we have traveled to the past. When the tricycle returns to the residence, we have traveled a little more than eight kilometers. But the journey has been much longer: Diana has passed through Coma Cros, the shacks by the Ter river where hundreds of migrant families lived in the 50s and 60s – before a flood swept them away –, the job on Barcelona street and her first love with a Catalan. “There were many people who envied me and said: ‘Look, she’s going by bike,’ ‘Look, she’s going with a Catalan’…,” she explains while claiming her freedom. “I don’t care at all. I’m going with him.” It was in the shacks where she met who would become her husband. With him, she began to go by bicycle to the dances in the surrounding villages and also received her first own bicycle, after one given to her by her aunt was stolen. And it was by bike that they went to all possible dances to party.

Seventy years later, the tricycle has allowed her to do what she likes most again: “run”.