Map - Hernani, Spain (Hernani)

Hernani is a town and municipality located in the province of Gipuzkoa, Basque Autonomous Community, Spain. The town sits on the left bank of the Urumea river. It is located at a distance of 9.2 km from San Sebastián. The municipality of Hernani occupies an area of approximately 40 square kilometres and is bordered by San Sebastián, Astigarraga, Arano, Elduayen, Errenteria, Lasarte-Oria and Urnieta.

From the town centre, at the foot of Mount Santa Barbara, it is possible to see a large area of the valley of Urumea. Its festivities, held between 23 and 27 June in honour of John the Baptist; and between his celebrations the popular "azeri dantza" (also celebrated in celebrations of Carnival) should be emphasized.

The title character of Victor Hugo's play Hernani is named after the town.

During the Middle Ages, the territory that would form the province of Gipuzkoa was divided in valleys and Hernani was one of them. The valley of Hernani formerly extended through all the space surrounding the lower courses of the rivers Urumea and Oria.

The valley of Hernani is first attested in a document whereby the Castilian count Fernán González of Castile grants vows in favour of the Monasteries of San Millan de la Cogolla, dating from the year 938 but believed to be a fake document from the thirteenth century. Dated from the late twelfth century, the donation document of the Monastery of San Sebastián to the Monastery of Leyre in Navarre by the king Sancho VI of Navarre states that the monastery of San Sebastián was in the borders of Hernani.

When this Navarrese king founded the town of San Sebastián around 1180, the territory of the valley of Hernani was included within the jurisdiction of the new coastal town. It is not known when Hernani turned into a town, with its charter being lost in a fire along with other files. Some assume that the foundation of the town occurred during the reign of the king Alfonso X of Castile in the second half of the 13th century, when this king established a network of strategic towns dotting the route reaching the coast of Gipuzkoa, with Hernani as one of its strategic localities. Others delay the foundation of the town until the late 14th century in 1379, as a document of the 15th century cites an agreement between the councils of Hernani and San Sebastián for the use of the mountains of the valley of Urumea that took place in 1379, which attests to the existence by that time of the town Hernani.

The town of Hernani extended its jurisdiction only to part of the old valley. It lost all the coastal and lower valley of Urumea now included in the San Sebastián strip, and the western area in the valley of the Oria, which became the town of Usurbil in 1371. Its western limit continued to be the Oria river, while on the east the mountains separated it from Oiartzun. The old town of Hernani sits on a 42 metres high rise towering over the left bank of the river Urumea and in turn located at the foot of Mount Santa Barbara. The old town was oval in shape, surrounded by walls with several entrances, of which only one (in Felipe Sagarna "Zapa" street) is surviving to date. It was originally made up of two streets, the High Street, Kale Nagusia, and Kardaberaz Street, intersected at the same time by a perpendicular lane (streets Nafarroa and its extension Felipe Sagarna "Zapa").

The first municipal ordinances go back to 1542, since copies of the 1512 ordinances disappeared during an invasion of the French army. The town has been subject to invasions and destruction numerous times throughout its history: the medieval factional wars, French invasions in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; as well as the hard sieges during the Carlist Wars and finally the 1936 Spanish Civil War. In 1986, Lasarte, a historical district of Hernani located in the valley of Oria, detached from the town following its rapid urban and demographic development.