Established by the Catholic Church's Jesuit missionary Juan María de Salvatierra, Loreto was the first successful mission and Spanish town in Baja California.

This failure by Admiral Isidro de Atondo y Antillón and the Jesuit missionary Eusebio Francisco Kino led directly to the success at Loreto 12 years later.

He ultimately persuaded some of his colleagues, including Salvatierra and the authorities in New Spain, to allow the Jesuits to return to the peninsula, but this time on their own responsibility and largely at their own expense.

Salvatierra would soon be joined at Loreto by Francisco María Piccolo, and they were supported from the mainland by the procurador for the mission, Juan de Ugarte.

On October 19, 1697, Salvatierra, with nine armed men, disembarked from the galley Santa Elvira at the place that the Indians called Coruncho (Cochimi: red-coloured mangrove).

On October 25 they carried the image of the Virgin of Our Lady of Loreto in a solemn procession, a ritual of faith that claimed the area as Spanish territory.

[3] A Monqui ranchería – a settlement whose population was usually 50 to 80 persons – was only a few hundred feet from where the Spanish decided to build the mission – with the only waterholes in the area between the two.

[5] The Loreto Mission would prove "worthless as a breadbasket" because of insufficient water to irrigate crops, but valuable as a base for expansion of the missionary enterprise and Spanish control of Baja California.

[6] In succeeding years, with Loreto as the base, the Jesuits created several new missions in south-central Baja California and then in more remote portions of the peninsula both to the north and to the south.