The relic's verifiable history is bound to the Arca Santa. According to Asturian tradition the chest was carried out of Jerusalem before the Persian sack of 614, moved across North Africa to Spain, kept at Toledo, and taken north into the mountains of Asturias during the Muslim conquest, finally housed at Oviedo. King Alfonso VI and the Cid are associated with the opening of the chest in 1075, and a document of that year lists its contents. Some scholars connect the cloth with a face cloth mentioned by an anonymous pilgrim of Piacenza around 570, though the link is uncertain. From the medieval period onward the Sudarium has remained at Oviedo, surviving a fire that damaged the Camara Santa in 1934 during the Asturian revolt, after which the chamber was rebuilt.
The Sudarium's documented custodial history in Spain is considerably older than its claimed origin: it has been kept at Oviedo, in the Camara Santa of the Cathedral of San Salvador, since at least the early medieval period, with a documented inventory reference from 1075, when King Alfonso VI had the chest containing it formally opened and its contents catalogued. Its earlier history, how and when it reached Spain from the Near East the tradition claims as its point of origin, rests on legendary rather than documentary evidence, a gap of several centuries between the traditional first-century origin and the earliest solid documentary attestation in Spain that the radiocarbon results, placing its material in the seventh or eighth century, would in fact largely close if the dating is accepted at face value.