Alonso Hernandez del Portillo

Who is Alonso Hernandez del Portillo?

Alonso Hernandez del Portillo was born in Gibraltar in 1543, during the period when the city was under Spanish rule. He served on the Gibraltar city council, where he held responsibility for overseeing the city's food supply, a role known locally as jurado, during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Between roughly 1605 and 1610, and later revised between 1615 and 1622, he wrote "Historia de la Muy Noble y Mas Leal Ciudad de Gibraltar" (History of the Very Noble and Most Loyal City of Gibraltar), widely regarded as the first written history of Gibraltar. The chronicle traces the city's story from legendary origins associated with Heracles through to his own lifetime, blending eyewitness testimony with folkloric and legendary material, and offering relatively little on the preceding Moorish period. Its principal historical value lies in his firsthand account of events he personally witnessed. The manuscript was preserved in the archives of Algeciras and later served as a key source for the Spanish historian Ignacio Lopez de Ayala's influential 1782 history of Gibraltar. Hernandez del Portillo died in 1624.

Sources: Wikipedia, "Alonso Hernandez del Portillo" · gibraltar-intro.blogspot.com, "1625 - Alonso Hernandez del Portillo" · Instituto de Estudios Campogibraltarenos, digitized edition of "Historia de Gibraltar" (institutoecg.es)