Istán is one of a number of villages of Moorish origin which owes its survival to its distance from the coast. After the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula in the 15th Century, Arabs were barred from living within a league of the shoreline in order to prevent them from communicating with their kinsmen across the straits in Morocco. Istán, 15 kilometres inland, was allowed to remain while the coastal Arab settlements were depopulated and frequently destroyed.

That is not to say that the mountain villages were unmolested and left in peace. The post-reconquest years were turbulent ones which frequently erupted into violence which resulted in harsh and unforgiving repression for the remaining Moors. Istán was lucky. Two associated villages - Arboto and Daidin - were erased from the landscape so effectively that their precise locations are no longer known. Even so, the Arab population dwindled, and was largely replaced by Christian settlers from Castile and Murcia. So many came from the Murcian village of El Cristo de Panocho, that the people of Istán acquired a nickname - panochos - which has survived to this day. Very little remains of Moorish Istán, merely the crumbling remains of a tower hidden in a side street, but at least there is some, and the village still has the timeless air that outsiders find so appealing.

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