We study the behavior of strongly interacting matter under an external constant magnetic field in the context of nonlocal chiral quark models within the mean field approximation. We find that at zero temperature the behavior of the quark condensates shows the expected magnetic catalysis effect, our predictions being in good quantitative agreement with lattice QCD results. On the other hand, in contrast to what happens in the standard local Nambu−Jona-Lasinio model, when the analysis is extended to the case of finite temperature our results show that nonlocal models naturally lead to the Inverse Magnetic Catalysis effect.PACS numbers: 21.65. Qr, 25.75.Nq, 75.30.Kz, 11.30.Rd 1 Over the last few years, the understanding of the behavior of strongly interacting matter under extremely intense magnetic fields has attracted increasing attention, due to its relevance for various subjects such as the physics of compact objects like magnetars [1], the analysis of heavy ion collisions at very high energies [2] and the study of the first phases of the Universe [3]. Consequently, considerable work has been devoted to studying the structure of the QCD phase diagram in the presence of an external magnetic field (see Refs. [4][5][6] for recent reviews). On the basis of the results arising from most low-energy effective models of QCD it was generally expected that, at zero chemical potential, the magnetic field would lead to an enhancement of the chiral condensate ("magnetic catalysis"), independently of the temperature of the system. However, lattice QCD (LQCD) calculations carried out with physical pion masses [7,8] show that, whereas at low temperatures one finds indeed such an enhancement, the situation is quite different close to the critical chiral restoration temperature: in that region light quark condensates exhibit a nonmonotonic behavior as functions of the external magnetic field, which results in a decrease of the transition temperature when the magnetic field is increased. This effect is known as inverse magnetic catalysis (IMC). Although many scenarios have been considered in the last few years to account for the IMC , the mechanism behind this effect is not yet fully understood. With this motivation, in this work we study the behavior of strongly interacting matter under an ex-