Rieju

A Bicycle Workshop in Figueres

Walk through Figueres today, a Catalan town better known internationally for Salvador Dalí than for machine tools, and it takes some imagination to picture it in 1934 as the birthplace of a motorcycle company. But that year, two young men, Luis Riera Carré and Jaime Juanola Farrés, went into business together making bicycle accessories. The name they gave the company was built from their own surnames — RIEra and JUanola fused into Rieju. Some sources suggest the letters came from their middle names rather than surnames, and the record isn't perfectly clean on that point, but the basic mechanism is agreed upon: two founders, two names, one word.

Their timing was terrible. The pair had purchased land and started raising a factory building when the Spanish Civil War broke out. The unfinished structure was seized by the Republican government and pressed into service as a truck depot — not exactly the start either man had planned. It would be 1940, with the war over, before Rieju could resume any real industrial activity, making bicycle parts in the meantime. In 1942 the business was formally incorporated as a Sociedad Limitada with a modest capital of one million pesetas. By then it had 35 employees turning out about 30 bicycles a week — a small, unglamorous operation, but a real one, and it survived.

From Bicycles to Motorcycles

The move into powered two-wheelers came in the second half of the 1940s. By most accounts, Rieju's engineers began developing a motorized bicycle around 1945, with the first units actually built and sold a couple of years later. There is conflicting information about the exact specification of that first machine — the commonly cited details point to a small auxiliary engine sourced from the French firm Serwa, though sources differ on the year and even the engine type involved. A second model followed in July 1949, this one fitted with a French 50cc engine, and the company's direction was set.

The real graduation to motorcycles came in 1953, with a 175cc model that turned out to be the machine Rieju needed. It was reliable, distributors wanted it, and it built the kind of quiet reputation that keeps a small manufacturer alive while larger, better-funded Spanish rivals fell by the wayside during a brutal period for the country's motorcycle industry. That 175 is arguably the machine that saved the company before it had even had a chance to establish itself.

Not every bet paid off. In 1958 Rieju introduced the Isard, an odd-looking hybrid that split the difference between motorcycle and scooter. It flopped. Production limped along until 1960, when Rieju simply gave up on it, having sold only a handful. The company recovered quickly, though, with a far more conservative machine called the Jaca in 1959, powered by a 125cc two-stroke AMC engine. The Jaca sold close to 3,200 units between 1959 and 1963 — proof that in Franco-era Spain, unglamorous and dependable beat stylish and strange.

The Minarelli Years and the Making of a Real Manufacturer

The single most important business decision in Rieju's early history was arguably the 1964 licensing agreement with the Italian engine builder Minarelli. It gave Rieju access to proven, modern small-displacement engines without having to fund engine development from scratch, and it let the company focus its energy on chassis, styling, and market fit. The Jaca line was reengineered around a 50cc Minarelli engine and became a genuine commercial success, carrying Rieju through a strong stretch of the mid-1960s.

The relationship with off-road riding deepened through the 1970s, though the details of exactly how and when are not consistently reported. Sources indicate Rieju moved into dirt-oriented machines with simple models later in the decade, and that higher-performance 50cc and 74cc versions eventually found a real following among Spanish riders, but the precise timeline varies enough between accounts that it's best treated as a general trend rather than a fixed date. Eighty-cc competition machines started turning up in national and international off-road events through the 1980s, including entries in the International Six Days Enduro, and a model called the Marathon became Rieju's standard-bearer in that class. The Marathon's success pushed Rieju further into enduro as a serious part of its identity rather than a side project, and by most accounts the company showed a related model called the Sprint at the Barcelona show around the mid-1980s, built on the same underlying platform — sources differ on the exact year and the precise lineage between the two, but the connection between them is well established. Around that same period Rieju picked up a Silver Plate for Motorcycle Achievement from the Spanish government after a strong second-place finish in the Enduro World Championship, a rare bit of official recognition for a company that had spent three decades quietly making unglamorous small bikes.

Rieju's ambitions widened in the mid-1990s, with a push into markets beyond Spain built on competitively priced machines and, notably, some of the earliest electric scooters to come out of the company. Around 1992 Rieju introduced a model called the Windy, an automatic moped with disc brakes and underseat storage — the sort of practical, commuter-minded engineering the brand did well. Rieju has associated this launch with an anniversary milestone, though the arithmetic against a 1934 founding date doesn't line up cleanly with any round number, so that anniversary framing is worth taking with a grain of salt even if the model itself is real.

The 2000s brought a genuine modernization of the range. The MRX, introduced in 2001, adopted a perimeter chassis, leaving the old double-cradle tubular frame to the RR line alone. A year later came the RS2, powered by the Minarelli AM6 engine, and it remains one of the most recognized names in Rieju's back catalog — a sharply styled small-displacement road bike that captured exactly the kind of rider Rieju had always understood: young, budget-conscious, and looking for something that looked faster than its displacement suggested.

Racing in the Blood

Rieju's competition history runs almost as deep as its road-bike history. The company's first real works effort came in 1978 with the TT 406, a 74cc enduro machine entered in the Spanish Enduro Championship's 75cc class. That program fed directly into the Marathon series that followed in 1979 and 1980 — distinct models developed in sequence rather than one simply becoming the other, but part of a continuous competition effort.

Working with Minarelli power, Rieju built a genuinely strong enduro program through the late 1970s and 1980s, amassing something like a dozen national championships in the 75cc class and nine Spanish Championship wins in the 80cc enduro category, on top of that runner-up finish at the 1985 ISDE. For a company still primarily selling mopeds and small road bikes to Spanish commuters, it was a serious racing pedigree.

Rieju also tried to institutionalize its role as a talent pipeline. In 2000 the company launched a National Supermotard Championship aimed at developing young riders, and the Rieju Supermotard Cup that grew out of it is credited, at least by the company's own telling, with helping launch riders who went on to Grand Prix racing — names associated with that era include Pol and Aleix Espargaró and Ricardo Cardús, though the specific placements attributed to the Espargaró brothers in that inaugural cup haven't been independently confirmed and should be read as company lore rather than settled record. The same caution applies to a claim that Carlos Checa, later a World Superbike champion, won a Spanish Speed Championship in the early 1990s aboard a Rieju RST80 — plausible given Rieju's presence in Spanish national racing at the time, but not something that turns up cleanly in independent sources.

More recent competition claims are similarly mixed. Rieju's presence at the Dakar Rally has been reported with different years depending on the source, so it's safer to say the marque has taken part in Dakar at various points in recent years rather than commit to a single edition. A win for rider Filippo Ciotti in a production-class event around 2011 appears in company materials without clear outside corroboration. What does seem to be verifiable, and worth highlighting, is the strength of Rieju's women's enduro program in recent years — the RIEJU Factory Team has fielded riders competing at the top of the FIM Women's Enduro World Championship, including American rider Rachel Gutish, though the historical record doesn't cleanly settle claims about where her results rank among American riders in the championship's history.

Ownership, Survival, and the GasGas Deal

What sets Rieju apart from almost every other Spanish marque of its generation is what didn't happen to it. It never went bankrupt. It was never sold off to a foreign conglomerate or absorbed into somebody else's brand portfolio. The company that Luis Riera Carré and Jaime Juanola Farrés started in 1934 is still run by the Riera family, with Jordi Riera, grandson of the co-founder, now serving as chairman and chief executive. In an industry where Spanish names like Bultaco, Ossa, and Montesa all suffered collapse, sale, or long dormancy at various points, Rieju's continuous, boring, family-controlled stability is itself the most unusual thing about it.

The biggest strategic move of the modern era came in March 2020, when Rieju acquired the intellectual and industrial property behind the enduro platform that Torrot Electric Europa had been marketing under the GasGas name — specifically the 250cc and 300cc EC, XC, and GP models introduced from 2017, along with the Ranger model added in 2019. Rieju began building and selling these machines under its own MR badge from June 2020, instantly giving the company a modern, competition-proven off-road lineup without having to develop it from a blank sheet — a strategy not unlike the Minarelli engine deal that had shaped the company's fortunes six decades earlier.

Rieju has kept pushing into electrification too. In July 2024 the company bought Win Life Electric Vehicles, along with the intellectual property behind its Ray 7.7 electric scooter, adding to an electric scooter effort that dates back to Rieju's international expansion in the 1990s.

Rieju Today

Every Rieju motorcycle is still built at the company's factory in Figueres — the same town, and arguably something close to the same site in spirit, where Riera and Juanola first tried to put up a factory building nearly ninety years ago. Rieju remains focused on small and medium displacement machines, roughly 49cc to 500cc, which has always been the space where the company's engineering and market instincts are sharpest.

The current lineup leans heavily on the MR series of off-road bikes — the MR Pro, MR Racing, and MR Ranger among them — spanning 125cc to 300cc, mixing two-stroke and four-stroke options, and drawing on both Minarelli-derived engines for the smaller machines and the rebranded GasGas-derived platform for the larger ones. On the street and urban side, the 2022 E-City electric scooter, offered in 50cc-equivalent and 125cc-equivalent versions, continues the company's long habit of building practical, license-friendly machines for city riders.

Heading into the second half of the 2020s, Rieju faces the same pressures as every small manufacturer: tightening emissions regulation, a shifting rider base, and competition from much larger companies with far deeper budgets. Its response has been to lean into what it already does well — focused off-road and supermoto machines, export markets, and the GasGas platform it now owns outright — rather than chase segments where it can't compete on scale. It's a strategy that looks a lot like the one that got Rieju through the 1950s and 1960s: pick your fights carefully, build something dependable, and let the bigger companies worry about everything else. Rieju still has a loyal following in Southern Europe and Latin America in particular, in markets where small-displacement machines aren't a compromise but the whole point. Ninety years after two men with a bicycle workshop in Figueres put their names together, that's still the company's real identity.