Eulalia Technical Institute: one hundred years / Exhibitions / Visit us / Home
October 2025 marked exactly one hundred years since the founding of the Eulàlia Technical Institute by Dr. Bartomeu Oliver and his wife Dolors Jordana. It was an educational center that represented the longings, difficulties and successes of education in Catalonia, at a time when secondary education was very underserved and in the hands, fundamentally, of religious institutions.
A product of the widespread restlessness of the Catalan school in the first third of the 20th century, the Eulàlia Technical Institute was conceived as a modern, secular, mixed and Catalan centre. The historical vicissitudes forced it to overcome the onslaughts of war (with the exile of the founders) and to become a bastion of freedom and tolerance under the dictatorship, while leading the pedagogical changes in the society of consumerism, competition and new technologies from the transition.
El Técnic Eulàlia, established in 1931 in its emblematic neo-Gothic house next to the Sarrià bridge, already distinguished itself from its beginnings for applying the Montessori method, for trips to the countryside, the incipient laboratories and the library, attention to sport and, above all, for its teaching staff, trained under the enthusiastic impetus of the Republic. Personalities of modern Catalan culture such as Josep Palau i Fabre, Montserrat Abelló, Jordi Sarsanedas, Josep Laporte, Joan Raventós, Frederic Roda, etc., were students.
With the war, the founders had to go into exile in Venezuela and, from then on, the school was in the hands of the Jordana-Masó family, brothers-in-law of the founder, who had to overcome threats and attempts to seize the building by the Francoist side, but he knew how to surround himself with young vocational teachers who had often seen their university aspirations cut short. For many years, the names of Josep Campmany, Rosa Jordana, Núria Bonet or Mercè Campmany were the visible leaders in the direction of the school.
The liberal nature of the Eulàlia Technical Institute was always present in the very varied social composition of the students, which gathered the children of the menstral families of Sarrià, those of the small bourgeoisie of Barcelona, some descendants of a certain social and economic prestige and a large flock of students of all conditions who arrived every day from Badalona by coach. In addition, the condition of a mixed school (separated in two parts of the same building due to the imposition of the dictatorship); the application of the so-called “English week” (Saturday afternoon was a public holiday); the end-of-year activities, often with music, dance and gymnastic exercises; the study trips, or the introduction of ski days in the winter served to create a spirit of school belonging that has been maintained over the years, even after the absorption of Tècnic Eulàlia by the Collserola Foundation in 1995, now under the name of Frederic Mistral/Tècnic Eulàlia.
Francesc Parcerisas
As part of this exhibition, the Biblioteca de Catalunya hosts a cycle of conferences on the centenary of the Eulàlia Technical Institute. Check it out program.
