This place was, during the Spanish era (and maybe even before then), known as Malunguey, a settlement located on the banks of the Agno river in the southern part of the Province of Pangasinan. In her book Pangasinan 1572-1800 (UP Press 1974; New Day Publishers, 1975), Rosario Mendoza Cortes says (pages 102-103): “. . . Or it must have been a settlement granted political recognition either late in
the sixteenth or early in the seventeenth century. In the absence of civil records, religious records furnish a clue as to when it became a pueblo. The first mention of Malunguey in the Actas Capitulares of the Dominican Order appears in the year 1614. It was included among the visitas of Binalatongan [now San Carlos City]. . .The assignment of a separate vicar to Malunguey in 1619 and the acceptance of its casa by the Dominican Order that year support the claim that by the second decade of the seventeenth century Malunguey had already been organized along political lines. . . Malunguey and Binalatongan . . . constituted the center of the revolt led by Andres Malong in 1660." The Research and Study Committee (created under a resolution adopted by the Sangguniang Bayan of Bayambang upon certification by the Municipal Mayor), after going through historical records, had determined as the date of the founding of the town “April 5, 1614”, the day being the feast day of its divine Patron, Saint Vincent Ferrer.
