Travel Guide Saint-Donat-Sur-L'Herbasse

In Gallo-Roman times, the town was known as Jovinzieu, the town of Jupiter. In 732, Corbus, bishop of Grenoble, took refuge here from a Saracen attack, bringing with him the relics of Saint Donat, a hermit originally from Orléans. The bishops of Grenoble succeeded one another in Jovinzieu for almost two centuries, building a palace and a church dedicated to Saint Donat and renaming the town. The Saint-Pierre-et-Saint-Paul collegiate church and the Delphinal palace still stand, overlooking Saint-Donat-sur-l'Herbasse, whose name refers to the medieval saint and the bucolic stream that borders the village. During the Wars of Religion, the relics of Saint Donat disappeared. But the village's name remained unchanged... During the Second World War, Saint-Donat was a center of resistance, where Louis Aragon and Elsa Triolet lived in hiding and clandestinely created the resistance newspaper Drôme en armes. The house they lived in, with its blue shutters, is marked on a corner of rue Pasteur. On June 15, 1944, the Nazis invaded the village in search of maquisards, and committed acts of reprisal against the inhabitants. Today, Saint-Donat-l'Herbasse is a small town of almost 4,000 inhabitants, surrounded by woods, tobacco fields and apricot orchards, renowned for its International Music Center. Dedicated to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, the center makes the collegiate church's magnificent organs resound during the August festival, and throughout the year with a high-quality program.