Funded jointly by the Netherlands and the United Kingdom with planning throughout the 1970s, construction of the JKT was completed in 1983 with the first photographic plate taken in March 1984.

[1] During construction in 1983, a Spanish container ship carrying parts of the telescope to La Palma was involved in an aircraft incident.

In what is known as the Alraigo incident, a British Royal Navy Sea Harrier fighter jet made an emergency landing on the base plate for the telescope.

[2] Being superseded by more recent and larger telescopes, it was taken out of service as a common-user facility in August 2003.

Since 2014, the telescope is owned by the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC) and operated by the Southeastern Association for Research in Astronomy (SARA)[1] which has retrofitted JKT as a remotely operated observatory (under the internal designation SARA-RM), with the first new observations in this regime in April 2016.