My poor clanking, clattering, perpetually missing-a-brake bicycle! Bought with handlebars so low you had to bend double to ride it off an Argentine couple who couldn’t believe my lack of Spanish, fixed by a friends flatmate, dragged home on the metro and up and unbelievable amount of stairs going through the Passeig de Gracia station, and later up eight flights of stairs to my flat, since I didn’t own a lock yet.

In Barcelona you require a lock not only for the actual bike that also laces through the front wheel, but also a separate one for the back wheel, seat, and any other part of the bike that might be inclined to wander off otherwise. I was careful, and had a ratty-looking old bike, but still lost both a seat and a back wheel during my year and a half stay.

Despite the sometimes intense traffic, cycling is one of the best ways to see Barcelona, so long as you keep your wits about you. With a bicycle distinct areas of the city that would otherwise be accessible only by bus or metro are suddenly quickly, if not always easily reached. La Sagrada Familia is perfectly bikeable, as are the rest of the Gaudí houses, though not Park Guëll without a superhuman effort. The bike is excellent to have at night. Although depending on your own state you may be a danger to yourself, it is nonetheless much safer going home through the dark streets when you can speed happily away from everyone else. In the intense summer heat and humidity it is much cooler to ride that to walk. And riding along the beachfront, on a sunny day or a moonlit night, is a constant reminder of how fortunate you are to live where you do.

And a bicycle makes you, in strange ways, more of a local. People are more likely to ask you for directions if you have a bicycle, and less likely to hand you tourist-trap fliers on the street. You are forced to enter into heated debates with senior citizens who don’t think you should be allowed to ride on the sidewalks but have no idea how scary the roads can be. You can feel smugly superior to the tourists on their rental bicycles and the fair-weather riders on the public city bikes… at least until your brake gives out, suddenly but not unexpectedly, on the downhill road home. And the two bicycle repair shops where I spent a good deal of time getting first one brake, and then another replaced were studies in contrast. One, a neighourhood Catalan shop whose ever-cheerful owners enjoyed trying to pronounce my last name and always did an excellent job, and the crowded, hard-to-find little operation down a back-street filled with languid and unfriendly African prostitutes, where men by the name of Jesus and Elvis worked temporary wonders.

Hair-raising journeys down Diagonal at rush hour notwithstanding, Barcelona and the bicycle are a match made in heaven.