The land was set aside early and defended often. On February 23, 1807, the City Council asked the provincial governor, Paulo José da Silva Gama, to donate the lowland for public use and as a holding ground for the herds that supplied the town. For more than a century afterward, government officials and private speculators tried repeatedly to carve it up for other purposes, and time after time the attempts were blocked. During the Ragamuffin War the várzea lay outside the city's defenses, and an inspection after the conflict found fences encroaching and even a mansion built at its center, all of it promptly torn down. The people of Porto Alegre kept insisting this ground belonged to everyone.

The transformation came in stages. In 1870 the lowland got its first official name, Campo do Bonfim, after the chapel rising on its northern edge, and in 1872 a military base was authorized in the southeastern corner, the seed of today's Military School of Porto Alegre. Real landscaping began only in 1927, when the Jardim Paulo Gama was laid out and the old parade of carts and herds was banned the following year. The decisive year was 1935. For the centenary of the Revolução Farroupilha, the entire southern field was drained, flushed, and urbanized to the designs of the French architect Alfred Agache, and the place took the name it still carries: Parque Farroupilha.

On Sunday mornings the park becomes the city's living room. From nine o'clock the Brique da Redenção unfolds along Avenida José Bonifácio, stalls of crafts, art, souvenirs, food, and antiques stretching down the avenue while families stroll and pass the gourd of mate from hand to hand. Saturdays bring their own rhythm, with an eco-fair of organic produce and a crafts fair of some sixty exhibitors. It is a democratic kind of place, a magnet for candidates at election time and for movements and causes of every description. On a sunny morning the lawns fill with people doing the simplest thing a park is for: being unhurried, together, in public.

Agache's design scattered surprises across the grounds. A little lake holds an island Belvedere reached by a bridge, where you can rent paddle boats, some shaped like swans, from a wharf renovated in 2004. Rising over the Avenue of the States is the Monument to the Expeditionary, a granite double arch 12.5 meters tall, inaugurated in 1957 to honor the gaúcho soldiers of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force who fought the Axis in Italy; it shelters the Pira da Pátria, lit on national holidays. Elsewhere the park borrows whole landscapes: an Oriental garden built around a dragon-shaped lake, with arched bridges, a pagoda, and a Buddha, sits a short walk from a European garden with its fountain and Roman pergola, near the Araújo Viana auditorium opened in 1964.