The Accomplishments of HERA

The HERA accelerator stopped operation at the end of June, 2007, after 15 years of successfully delivering data to the ZEUS, H1, HERMES and HERA-B experiments. The main features and accomplishments of HERA will be described. The main results of the H1 and ZEUS experiments in the area of strong interaction physics will then be reviewed: structure function measurements, rapidity gap physics, jet physics and the extraction of the strong coupling constant. Recent theoretical developments in understanding the HERA data will also be discussed, with focus on the striking behavior of the small-x data.