[7] Due to population controls and damage to livestock, Iberian wolves were, as of September 2021,[8][9][10] the only Western European subspecies of wolf whose hunting remained legal, yet only in Spain.

[11] Along with the difficulty of their hunt by virtue of their vigilant nature and the rarity of their sightings, they were strongly desired by many European hunters as a big-game trophy.

[5] Some authors claim that the south-eastern Spanish wolf, last sighted in Murcia in the 1930s, was a different subspecies called Canis lupus deitanus.

[16] In 2020, a genomic study of Eurasian wolves found that the populations of the Dinaric Alps-Balkan Mountains region, the Iberian peninsula, and Italy diverged from each other 10,500 years ago followed by negligible gene flow between them.

The subspecies differentiation may have developed at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Ages due to the isolation of the Iberian Peninsula when glacier barriers grew in the Pyrenees and eventually reached the Gulf of Biscay in the west and the Mediterranean in the east.

[26] Until the 1930s, Iberian wolves were relatively spread throughout Portugal, but destruction of habitat, loss of wild ungulates and the persecution by humans[27] made it lose most of its territory (from around 44,100 km2 in 1900–1930, to only 16,300 km2 in 2002–2003) though populations have grown to about 29,000 km2 since.

[28] Some Spanish naturalists and conservationists such as Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente called for the end of the hunting and the protection of the animal.

[31] In October 2013, Ecologists in Action called for an urgent review of the Iberian wolf census, which may overestimate their numbers.

[32] Later that month, wolf association Lobo Marley sent 198,000 signatures calling for the animal's protection to the European Parliament Committee on Petitions.

[31] Sierra Morena is a system of rugged mountain ranges in the south of the Iberian Peninsula where a very small wolf population has lived in isolation for half a century.

It is thought that as the population of these wolves declined, the inability to find a mate led to inbreeding and hybridization with dogs.