Eduardo Tolosa

Eduardo Tolosa Alsina was a Spanish professor of calligraphy and gymnastics educator who founded the Gimnàs Tolosa in the 1880s under the name Gimnasio Médico, a Barcelona multi-sport gymnasium. Toghet with his wife Emília Colomer, he was a pioneer in women's gymnastics, being the director of a recreational Gymnasium for both sexes and with separate departments in the 1890s.

Early life Eduardo Tolosa was born in Vila de Gràcia, as the son of Eduard Tolosa i Alsina and Josepa Alsina i Gonfaus. He was the youngest of three children, Aurelio (1861–1938) and Trinidad. After his father died in the early 1870s, his mother remarried, now with Pere Garcia i Corbera (1833–1903), and one of their children was the doctor and sports promoter Jaime Garcia Alsina, who was thus Tolosa's half-brother.

Tolosa married Emília Colomer, and the couple had two children, including Eduardo, one of the world's first neurosurgeons, a pioneer in the surgical treatment of Parkinson's disease and discoverer of the Tolosa–Hunt syndrome.

Sporting career Tolosa was one of the few Catalans who studied at the Escuela Central de Gimnástica in Madrid (1887–1892), a short-lived school that worked as the first Spanish center for the specific training of Physical Education teachers, thus being one of the few teachers with an official gymnastics title in Barcelona. In fact, Tolosa, Vila, and Solé, as well as Narciso Masferrer and Ángel Rodríguez, began to promote football among that generation of Barcelona gymnasts to being an outdoor sport, which they considered as more appropriate to Spain's climate and their national peculiarities, hence why most of the first Barcelona clubs were born in gyms and under the protection and encouragement of characters linked to the Spanish Gymnastics Federation, such as Vila and Masferrer. According to the yearbook of the University of Barcelona of the 1902–03 academic year, which at the time was under the rectorship of Rafael Rodríguez Méndez, Tolosa was a teacher of calligraphy who lived in Duque de la Vitoria, as well as a "special assistant" of gymnastics.

In 1909, Tolosa, then the teacher of calligraphy at the Institute of Barcelona, together with fellow professors of drawing and calligraphy from the Normal Schools of other cities, sent a declaration to the Ministry of Public Instruction stating that by virtue of the second paragraph of the Royal order of 25 November 1908, they "must occupy the top of the ranking of the calligraphy teaching staff", which they eventually achieved since they had performed their positions since 1898 without interruption. Tolosa was also a gymnastic assistant at the Institute of Barcelona.

The date of his death is unknown.