History of Santa Elena
The area has been inhabited since prehistoric times, as evidenced by 5,000-year-old local cave paintings, which were declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1998. Unfortunately, these paintings in Cueva de los Escolares have suffered serious damage.
In the time of the Iberians, one of area’s great centres of worship, the Collado de los Jardines Sanctuary, was located in the vicinity of Santa Elena, in which a large number of Iberian votive offerings (small statuettes offered to the gods) appeared. In the upper area of this settlement, on a plateau, there is a large set of structures that must have formed a town in the Iberian, Roman and medieval times. The sanctuary is also known as the “Cueva de los Muñecos” (Cave of the Dolls) and was used by the Romans for religious worship until the end of the fourth century.
The most significant event in local history was the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, in which Caliph Al-Nasir established his camp in the area with his immense Almohad army. The great battle took place on July 17, 1212, concluding with the victory of Alfonso VIII’s army over the Almohads. A church (Iglesia Parroquial de Santa Elena) was built to guard and protect the Christian troops, whose triumph was considered a ‘miracle’ attributed to the building, overseen by Archbishop of Toledo Don Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada.
On this same site, Santa Elena was founded as one of the New Populations of Sierra Morena in the eighteenth century (1767), a project promoted by Carlos III and executed by Pablo de Olavide. The new population welcomed agricultural settlers from Central Europe, specifically French, German and Flemish, with the intention of establishing a population and generating wealth in the unpopulated areas of Sierra Morena. At the same time, it would secure the Despeñaperros (Camino de Madrid-Cádiz), in addition to a series of other utopias such as the installation and operation of a model rural society based on egalitarian urban centres and founded on the work of the land as the main source of wealth. It is the only New Population that does not have the Immaculate Conception as its patron saint, instead assuming the Emperatriz Santa Elena as its patron saint and perpetual Mayor. In 1793, due to its ruined state, the church was demolished under the reign of Carlos IV, who ordered the construction of a new colonial-style building in its place.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Santa Elena and Las Correderas railway stations of the Manzanares-Córdoba railway line were inaugurated.
In the second half of the twentieth century, even after a reform in 1983 that led to the widening of the road, the Despeñaperros pass on the N-IV became one of the points with the most accidents on the entire national road network due to the succession of curves, the high intensity of traffic and the circulation of large-tonnage trucks that suffered from the jackknife effect, with a limitation of 50 km/hour due to the winding of the route. In 2012, the tunnel of Despeñaperros was completed, concluding the modernisation of the Autovía del Sur. This vast feat of engineering established a network of tunnels and viaducts through the Despeñaperros Natural Park, with an estimated cost of 245 million Euros.
Unfortunately, the beginning of the twenty first century has been marked by a partial destruction of Santa Elena’s valuable UNESCO heritage; in 2014, the five-millennia-old Iberian schematic paintings in Cueva de Los Escolares were subject to an attempted theft which left them irreversibly damaged. In 2021, ‘The Priestesses’, an emblematic piece of rock art located in the shelter of Vacas del Retamoso, were destroyed with spray paint.