Montesa

A Gas-Generator Man Turns to Motorcycles

Barcelona, 1944. Pere Permanyer Puigjaner was 33, running a business built on producer gas generators, the kind of equipment that kept engines running in a Spain starved of fuel by the aftermath of civil war and a continent at war around it. Gasoline was scarce, industry was improvising, and Permanyer decided the moment called for something new: a branch of his operation devoted to motorcycles. He brought in Francesc Xavier "Paco" Bultó, and between them they founded what would become Montesa. The company didn't take its final legal shape immediately — that came on February 3, 1947, when the business was formally constituted as Permanyer, S.A. de Industrias Mecánicas. The capital split at that point is recorded as roughly 76 percent Permanyer family to 24 percent Bultó, though the very first balance sheet of the company, dated December 31, 1945, shows a different arrangement — Pere Permanyer and his father Marcelino holding about 89 percent, with Bultó at 11. The two figures likely reflect different moments in the company's early capitalization rather than a contradiction, but whichever one applied when, the arithmetic tells the same underlying story: this was a Permanyer company with Bultó as its essential technical partner, not an equal partnership of two founders.

The First Machines and a Parting of Ways

The starting point, quite literally, was a Motobecane. Bultó's nephew owned a Motobecane B1V2GR38, and it became the template for Montesa's first prototype. By June 1945, three examples of the new machine were on display at the Barcelona Trade Fair — the A-45, a rigid-frame 98cc runabout with a three-speed gearbox, built in a first batch of 22 units before total production settled around 100. It was modest, derivative, and exactly what postwar Spain needed.

Bultó followed it with something more ambitious: a 125cc roadster built for the trail rallies and semi-enduros that were popular sport in Spain at the time, tough enough that Montesa entered it in the 1951 International Six Days Trial, with Bultó himself riding alongside G. Cavestany. Through the early 1950s, Montesa also pushed into road racing, and by 1956 its 125cc machines were quick enough to take second, third, and fourth in the Ultra-Lightweight class at the Isle of Man TT — a serious result for a small Spanish factory racing against established European opposition.

The commercial backbone of the decade was the Brio 80, and later the Brio 90 — simple, well-made small-capacity roadsters that sold in numbers exceeding 12,000 units and funded a larger factory at Esplugues de Llobregat. The Brio also carried some genuinely thoughtful engineering for its class, including a relocated carburetor position and a proper handbrake, details that separated Montesa from the cheaper end of the Spanish market.

Then, in May 1958, the partnership that had built the company broke apart. Bultó left, taking a number of key people with him to found a rival firm, Bultaco, just down the road. It was a serious blow — Montesa lost its principal designer and the momentum that came with him — though the precise size of the ownership stake Bultó took with him isn't settled clearly enough in the record to state with confidence. What is clear is that Montesa had to rebuild its design direction from scratch, and quickly.

Building a New Identity: Impala, Cappra, Cota

That rebuilding produced the Impala, designed by Leopoldo Milà and introduced in 1962 — a 175cc street bike that became one of the defining Montesa road models of the decade, sold in several forms including the sportier Impala Sport and the budget Comando variant. It was good enough to be recognized for its industrial design in 1962, and it gave Montesa a commercial identity distinct from the machines Bultó had shaped. Production of the Impala moved into a new plant at Esplugues del Llobregat, construction of which began in September 1961.

Off-road, Montesa's direction shifted hard toward competition through the back half of the 1960s. The Cappra name appeared in 1967 on a 250cc machine, followed in 1968–70 by limited-production Cappra GP 250 and 350 versions built purely for grand prix motocross competition — a clean break from the Impala's road-going lineage. At the same time, Montesa entered trials seriously. Its first true trials machine, the Trial 250, arrived in 1967 and proved immediately competitive, winning the Spanish Trials Championship the following year. The name that would define the marque for the next half-century — Cota — was attached to the model in 1968, on a redesigned 246cc machine with a one-piece seat-and-tank unit and a five-speed gearbox. It won the Delta de Plata industrial design award and set the template Montesa has followed, in one form or another, ever since.

By the end of 1968, despite having just won an Italian 250cc speed championship, Montesa made the decision to step away from road racing altogether and commit its engineering resources to motocross and trials instead. It was a bet on where the sport, and the market, were heading — and it paid off. In 1969 Montesa took national motocross championships in Belgium, France, Italy, Switzerland, and the United States across the 250 and 500cc classes.

Trials Racing and the Riders Who Made It

Trials became Montesa's calling card. The company hired the British rider Don Smith, who won a European championship riding for the marque, beating Sammy Miller and his Bultaco Sherpa in the process — a nice irony given where Miller's rival machine's parent company had come from. Through the 1960s and 70s, Montesa built a genuine reputation in trials, taking the Scottish Six Days Trial among other major results.

The first World Trials Championship for the marque came in 1980, with Swedish rider Ulf Karlson. Sixteen years later, in 1996, Marc Colomer took the World title on a Montesa Cota 315, cementing that model's competition reputation. The modern era belongs almost entirely to Toni Bou, who has won world championships astride the Honda Montesa Cota 4RT in numbers that dwarf any other rider in the sport's history — 26 titles at last count, an extraordinary run built on a Spanish-built machine carrying a lineage that stretches straight back to that first Trial 250 of 1967. Laia Sanz, who joined the factory Montesa team in 2004, added her own World, European, and Spanish titles alongside teammates Bou and Takahisa Fujinami.

Crisis, Honda, and Survival

By the early 1980s, Montesa was in serious trouble. The Spanish motorcycle industry generally was being squeezed hard, and Montesa's solid industrial reputation was one of the only things keeping it from outright closure. The way out was an agreement with Honda Motor in 1982, which created a new joint company, Montesa Honda S.A. Honda committed to helping market the range through its European sales network, and the arrangement kept the Cota trials line alive through a genuinely difficult stretch — by 1985, following a further reorganization and injection of Honda capital, the workforce had shrunk to just 152 people and the model range had narrowed to two trials machines.

On July 1, 1986, Montesa Honda absorbed the remaining Montesa facilities and workers outright, with shareholding settling at 88 percent Honda and 12 percent the original Spanish partners. Pere Permanyer, the man who had started it all as a gas-generator entrepreneur four decades earlier, died on March 20, 1987, at 75 — he lived just long enough to see the company he founded become something new, but still recognizably his.

Honda took full ownership in 2005, and from that point Montesa's identity narrowed to what it remains today: a specialist builder of trials machines, powered by Honda four-stroke engines, aimed squarely at world-championship-level competition rather than the road.

Montesa Today

Production moved to Santa Perpètua de Mogoda in 2000, alongside the company's commercial headquarters, and it's from there that the current Cota range is built — machines engineered for the peculiar demands of modern trials, where the objective isn't speed but precision: rock gardens, log piles, and impossibly steep pitches where a single foot down costs you the section. Toni Bou's run of championships on the Cota 4RT has kept the Montesa name at the front of the sport for two decades running.

What makes Montesa's story unusual in the Spanish motorcycle industry isn't just that it survived — Bultaco, Ossa, and others didn't — but that it has kept a model wearing the Montesa badge in continuous production since the 1940s, an unbroken run that few manufacturers anywhere in the world can claim. Among collectors, early Cotas and Impalas hold steady interest; sources differ on top auction results for early trials models, but values for Montesa-Honda machines from the classic era typically settle in the low thousands of dollars depending on condition and rarity. It's a modest market compared to the exotica from Italy or Britain, but that's fitting for a marque that was never about spectacle — it was about a Barcelona businessman solving a fuel problem, a talented engineer building something better than what came before, and, eventually, a small Spanish factory that turned out to be very, very good at getting a motorcycle over a rock without putting a foot down.