High ground in the eastern Sierra Morena, beyond the Despeñaperros gorge, where the Christian kings broke the Almohad army on 16 July 1212 — called al-ʿUqāb in Arabic.
Las Navas de Tolosa is not a town but a stretch of upland in the eastern Sierra Morena, in the municipality of Santa Elena in the province of Jaén, close to La Carolina. The name describes the ground: navas are the flat, open basins that lie between the wooded ridges of the sierra, and it was one of these that gave two large armies room to deploy in country that otherwise offers none.
On 16 July 1212 the kings of Castile, Aragon and Navarre together defeated the Almohad caliph Muhammad al-Nasir here. The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa broke Almohad power in the peninsula, and within forty years Córdoba, Valencia and Seville had all fallen to Christian rulers.
The Sierra Morena is the long wall between the Castilian meseta and the Guadalquivir valley, and for an army it is passable only at certain points. The principal one is the gorge of Despeñaperros, immediately north of the battlefield — still the route of the main road and the railway, and still called the gate of Andalusia. Whoever held the passes held the approach to the south.
That is why the ground was fortified rather than settled. The castle of Castro Ferral commanded the approaches, and the Almohads had blocked the obvious defile so that the Christian army, having taken it, faced the choice of forcing a held pass or turning back. The campaign turned on the geography before it turned on the fighting.
The army got through by another way. Tradition — recorded in the Castilian sources and repeated ever since — credits a local herdsman, remembered as Martín Alhaja, with guiding the coalition over the Puerto del Rey, a pass that let them descend onto the open ground beyond and form up where the defenders did not expect them. He is said to have been rewarded with the hereditary name Cabeza de Vaca.
The story has the shape of a foundation legend and should be treated as one; what is not in doubt is that the army crossed the sierra by a route other than the blocked defile and arrived on ground of its own choosing. The plain the sources call the mesa del Rey, above the ravines, is where the two armies faced each other.
In Arabic the battle is not named for the navas at all. It is al-ʿUqāb, after the fortified point of that name near the field, and the defeat entered Arabic historiography under that name as the disaster that broke the Almohad state. Muhammad al-Nasir withdrew to Marrakesh and died the following year, and the caliphate never recovered its position in al-Andalus.
The double naming is a good illustration of how a place enters two traditions differently: a Castilian name taken from the landscape, and an Arabic one taken from the castle, fixed to the same afternoon.
Alfonso VIII marked his victory on the ground, founding a chapel dedicated to the Holy Cross and a fortified inn known as los palacios near the field. The village that now serves the site is far younger than the battle: Santa Elena was founded in 1767 as one of the Nuevas Poblaciones, the new settlements planted in the Sierra Morena by Charles III under Pablo de Olavide and peopled with German, Flemish and French colonists, partly in order to secure the Despeñaperros road against banditry.
A battlefield interpretation centre at Santa Elena now presents the campaign, and a nineteenth-century commemorative monument stands on the site. The field itself remains open sierra, which is the best thing about it: the ground that decided the battle is still legible as ground.