Alicia is the real promoter of this initiative. She was born in Santander, Spain, on February 26, 2000 and since the very first moment she was an extremely happy child. As one of her teachers said, she had the most contagious laugh that I had ever heard. With a strong character and an iron will, she always met the big and small challenges she faced during her short but intense life.

When she was 6, during a family overseas holiday, Alicia started to show some strange symptoms such as extreme tiredness, clumsiness in walking or sporadic vomiting, which initially were attributed to such a long journey for her age. Given that the symptoms worsened, the same day we came back home we took her to the hospital for evaluation.

After an emergency CT, we were told she had a brain tumor, but it was two days later, on August 21, 2006, at the Hospital Sant Joan de Deu in Barcelona when doctors gave us the worst diagnosis we could face: Alicia had a diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (DIPG), a highly malignant cancer, where surgery is not an option, which currently there is no cure for. Life expectancy for children affected by this tumor is about 12 months. The whole family was devastated.

After such a terrible and devastating diagnosis, we started to look for avaliable treatments in the best medical centers around the world. Any of them didn't give us any hope.

Finally, it was in the same Hospital where Alicia was diagnosed where we were offered a new and experimental treatment which gave us at least a chance to fight ant try it.

Alicia's fight lasted 15 months. She underwent radiotherapy, chemotherapy, rehabilitation ... .... but she always remained strong and with the same fighting spirit that she always showed. She was who encouraged everyone to plan new activities, go out for a dinner, go to the cinema .... she never gave up. During those intense months, she met her baby cousin and shared her first year of life together, she got the puppy she had always wished, she visited Florence and the Leaning Tower in Pisa, she learned to read and write and she did so many things which would make this list never ending.

Alicia left us on November 21, 2007, but she is and always will be among her family and in the memory of everyone who had the privilege to know her.