HISTORY
The oldest evidence of human presence locally is the cave paintings of the Navalcán enclave, dated to the Copper Age. Between the end of the War of Granada in 1492 and the early sixteenth century, the lands surrounding today’s Noalejo were “entredichos”, or intermediate territorial bands not belonging to any specific municipality. The delineation of boundaries and ownership was therefore hotly disputed by the Councils of Granada and Jaén. In 1559, Mencía de Salcedo, servant of the Empress Isabel of Portugal and Felipe II, bought the civil and criminal jurisdiction of these lands from the Crown, obtaining the royal license to till 1,500 bushels of land. The intervention of both councils led to the founding of Noalejo as an independent municipality in the early sixteenth century.
While the disputes between the Archbishopric of Granada and the Bishopric of Jaén were being resolved, in 1568, the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the town was ceded by bull to the Abbey of Alcalá la Real. When the abbey was suppressed in 1851, it was definitively integrated into the Diocese of Jaén. Previously, in 1833, it was included by Javier de Burgos within the province of Jaén. Noalejo was the mayorazgo of the Maldonado de Saldedo family, Lords of Noalejo until the abolition of the señoríos in the Cortes of Cádiz in 1812. In 1838, during the reign of Isabel II, the Huelma court recognized the property in private title to María del Pilar Osorio y Gutiérrez de los Ríos, III Duchess of Fernán Núñez. In 1872, the process of reattributing plots of land to the residents of Noalejo began.
In 2007, the town was chosen to house the operational base of the Eastern Andalusia Emergency Group (GREAOR).
At the end of the twentieth century, the fall in the profitability of farmland prompted emigration towards the cities and other industrial and touristic centres. Between 1998 and 2017, the population fell by 14.43 percent.