‘El Tolmo de Minateda’ is a hill that stands at a strategic crossroads between the southern Meseta and the Mediterranean coast. It has been inhabited since the Bronze Age. In 1988, a systematic project was initiated by the University of Alicante and the Museum of Albacete. The project, directed by Lorenzo Abad, Sonia Gutiérrez, Blanca Gamo and Pablo Cánovas, involves several overlapping sites and, consequently, very different historical problems in their own diachronic sequence, which are dealt with by different teams. Among all the lines developed, it is worth highlighting the significance of ‘El Tolmo de Minateda’ for research into the Early Middle Ages. The peculiar diachrony of the settlement, practically uninhabited before the 7th century and abandoned in its urban condition after the 9th century, makes it a spectacular laboratory for analysing the early medieval phases that are usually diluted in other urban centres of Roman or Islamic origin. ‘El Tolmo’ shows an urban space from the Visigothic period in the process of Islamisation, but which does not yet reflect the triumph of Islamic society. This opens up new research perspectives that require us to reconsider the problem of the revival of certain cities in the Visigothic period in a framework of a supposed crisis of urban life; the materiality of their urban facilities and the level of their buildings; the transformation of domestic structures and the influence of Islamisation on this evolution; the definition of pre-caliphate Islamic urban planning; the survival of indigenous traditions in the culture and the material indicators of social and cultural change, etc.

Presentation of the results obtained after more than 30 archaeological intervention campaigns at this important medieval site in La Meseta. On the south bank of the Guadiana, with pre-Roman antecedents, its importance in history dates back to the 9th century, in the Andalusian period, when it became the main inhabited centre on the road between Córdoba and Toledo. In the mid-12th century, when it passed into Christian hands for the first time, it was the place where the first Hispanic military order was founded, adopting its toponym as its name. Its important strategic role would last and grow during the seventeen years in which it passed back into Islamic hands under the Almohads, thus becoming the vanguard of their power in al-Andalus. After 1212, when it definitively became part of the kingdom of Castile, its role in the region was gradually replaced by other towns, and it was finally abandoned at the beginning of the 15th century.