[2] As the founder of Català, Vila was the great rival of FC Barcelona, founded by Joan Gamper, at the turn of the century.
[1] Born in 1860 in the Lleida town of Les Oluges to a family of peasants, Vila moved to Barcelona at the tender age of just 14 years old.
[4] Vila was a man of clear and personal ideas and in the early 1890s, he set out to create a system that would make work all the muscles of the body, without exception.
[4] First, he had a blacksmith build a series of pulleys in the gym, which at that time constituted a novelty, and then, he combined those devices with weights, rope, ladder, and bars.
[4] This system, which had nothing to do with what he had practiced in Tolosa until then, introduced the novelty of a self-made educational system, which distinguished the Tolosa gym from the other gymnasiums of that time, and thus, it began attracting a lot of new students, who were mainly athletes who faced tough physical challenges, such as boxers, cyclists or rowers, who came to his gym to better strengthen their body.
[1] Being the embellishment of the human body genesis of agility and strength, to you, Jaume Vila, master excelling in the regenerationist art of harmony, in the development in balance and creator of wills and energies, we now pay homage in respect.
[1] On 24 September 1900, in a meeting held in Barcelona by the Spanish Gymnastics Federation, he was awarded the first Diploma of Honor, created by the painter Antonio Utrillo.
[3][7][8] On 21 October 1899, Vila, together with his students, founded the Català Futbol Club, in a meeting held at the Tolosa gym, thus becoming the first football team formed in Catalonia.
[4] In fact, the only reason why he began to promote football among his students was because it was the sport with the best chance of hatching among that generation of Barcelona gymnasts due to being an outdoor sport, and that is also why most of the first Barcelona clubs were born in gyms and under the protection and encouragement of characters linked to the Spanish Gymnastic Federation such as Jaime Vila and Narciso Masferrer.
[7] In December 1901, the 41-year-old Vila featured in two friendly matches against FC Barcelona as a midfielder, with both games ending in heavy losses (1–4 and 0–8).
[14] One of his outstanding students was Nemesi Ponsati, who also dedicated his entire life to the sporting world, as a practitioner of Swedish gymnastics, water polo, swimming, and athletics.
They came to Barcelona shortly before the Spanish Civil War began, so they had to live in a flat on Bonavista street, but they got through it without any major incident.