Nawa lies in a high valley between the conical hills of Tell al-Jabiya and Tell al-Jumu'a on its west and the Tulul al-Hish volcanic cones to its northeast.

Numerous basalt architectural elements from the Byzantine period, bearing Jewish symbols—most prominently the menorah—were discovered reused as spolia within Nawa (A. Reifenberg, 'Ancient Hebrew Arts', 1952).

The historians Clive Foss and Irfan Shahid suggested that the Ghassanids left some architectural traces in Nawa, namely an audience chamber in one of the town's ruined palaces (which parallels that of al-Mundhir III outside Resafa) and churches.

Under the Islamic caliphates of the Rashidun, Umayyads, Abbasids, and Fatimids (7th–11th centuries), Nawa was a part of Jund Dimashq (the military district of Damascus) and the principal city of the Hauran.

In 985 the Jerusalemite geographer al-Muqaddasi described Nawa as the principal city of the districts of Bathaniyya (the Hauran plain) and Hawran (the Jabal al-Druze) of Jund Dimashq, and that its land were rich in grain.

[15] During the Mamluk period (1260s–1517), Nawa was the center of the amal (subdistrict) of Jaydur (the northwestern Hauran plain), part of the southern safqa (march) of the Damascus mamlaka (province).

[16] In 1884 the American archaeologist Gottlieb Schumacher noted that Nawa was the second largest locality in the Hauran after Daraa, at least terms of its gross area.

It had 300 dwellings, mostly constructed of reused ancient basaltic blocks and without mortar, many having timber roofs supplied by recent Circassian settlers from the forests of the northern Jawlan.

Nawa's streets were wide and straight and in the center of the village was a large open area set around Ayn al-Ramashta, which at that time measured 14 feet (4.3 m) deep.

[19] Schumacher noted that Nawa had been one of the most populous and important places of the northwestern Hauran since ancient times and was "a village which has been built of ruins, and is surrounded by a great field of them, but yet itself contains hardly anything except modern buildings".

[21] In July 2018, the citizens of Nawa were subject to heavy Syrian government and Russian military bombardment, in an effort to rid the city from its anti-government forces.