Mongui

The Mongui, or Monqui, were hunter-gatherer Indians who at Spanish contact held a short stretch of the Gulf of California coast around Loreto in Baja California Sur, with the Cochimi as their inland neighbours. They moved in small autonomous bands called rancherias, having neither agriculture, pottery, boats nor fixed shelters, and lived from the shore, the inland valleys and the Sierra de la Giganta.

Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers were the first Europeans to meet them. A mission attempt by Eusebio Kino at San Bruno failed in 1684, but in 1697 the Jesuit Juan Maria de Salvatierra founded Loreto, the peninsula's first permanent mission, on Mongui land.

Nearly four hundred Mongui settled near Loreto by 1698, yet Old World diseases reduced its Indian population to 134 by 1733. Before the end of the eighteenth century their traditional life had disappeared, and their poorly recorded language vanished with it.