[7] Formerly it was a border area, a vast wilderness with little population, and its mountain passes were important for the communication between Andalusia and Central Spain.

The peaks of the ranges are not very high on average, in fact Sierra Morena's highest point is the lowest among the mountain systems of the Iberian Peninsula.

Nevertheless, the Sierra Morena looks like a true mountain range seen from the Baetic Depression in the south with impressive southward-facing slopes and gorges.

[18] The Nuevas Poblaciones de Andalucía y Sierra Morena [es] administrative division was started in 1767 during the reign of Charles III of Spain in order to populate the mountainous zone.

When Sancho Panza suggests the mountains as a refuge from the Holy Brotherhood after Don Quixote frees a group of galley slaves, the two escape into the Sierra Morena.

The forbidding landscape of Sierra Morena was also the setting for the majority of the eerie and supernatural goings-on in Jan Potocki's The Manuscript Found in Saragossa written in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Among the amphibians, wells and ponds in many areas of the range provide a habitat for the near-threatened Iberian ribbed newt.