On 25 January 1535, only weeks after the Spanish founding of Quito, the city's Cabildo mapped out the Ejidos del Rey - the common lands that every Spanish colonial town needed for grazing livestock. Three were established: the North Ejido (which would become this park), the Turubamba or South Ejido, and the Conocoto or East Ejido. The North Ejido ran along the royal road between La Alameda and Cotocollao. For four hundred years it served as pasture. It also served as execution ground. From the sixteenth century until the early twentieth, the Ejido held a firing squad post and a pillory where criminals were hanged and publicly shamed. A pillory still stood here until the 1920s. Under President Gabriel García Moreno in the 1860s and 70s, the land became something else again - a burial ground for dissidents, excommunicated people, and Protestants who could not be laid in consecrated Catholic soil. Layers of public use, each reflecting the city's hierarchies and fears.

Eloy Alfaro had been the architect of the Ecuadorian Liberal Revolution. Twice president, responsible for separating church from state, building railroads, expanding public education - he was an extraordinary figure by any measure, and an extremely polarizing one. In January 1912, after attempting to settle a factional dispute in Guayaquil, he was imprisoned in the García Moreno prison in Quito along with several allies. On the 28th, a mob loyal to conservative factions broke into the prison. Alfaro and his followers were killed in their cells, then dragged behind horses through the streets to the North Ejido, where their bodies were burned in a public bonfire. La Hoguera Bárbara became one of the defining traumas of Ecuadorian political history - the country's liberal movement murdering its own founder in full public view. A century later, the event is still taught in Ecuadorian schools as a cautionary tale about political violence.

In 1922, the city made the transition formal. For the centennial of the Battle of Pichincha - the May 1822 engagement that sealed Ecuador's independence - the North Ejido was planted with trees, laid out in the asymmetrical curved pathways fashionable in European urban parks of the era, and reopened as Parque de Mayo. The design was typical of late-19th and early-20th century urbanism, with walks converging on an eccentric circle at the park's trapezoidal center. By 1914, the wealthy Ciudadela Larrea neighborhood had consolidated on the western side, its mansions built in the historicist styles then in vogue. By the 1920s, the aristocratic La Mariscal neighborhood was taking shape to the north. The old pasture had become surrounded by the city. Today, Parque El Ejido contains the highest concentration of heritage trees in the Metropolitan District of Quito - at least two dozen over a hundred years old, planted as the park opened.

Street artists perform in the park's internal plazas. In the northwest corner, men gather on weekends to play ecuavoley - a distinctively Ecuadorian three-player variant of volleyball - and cocos, a traditional Quito game where players use large metal balls to pull small coconuts out of a traced circle in the dirt. Both involve bets of 10 to 50 dollars. Monuments and busts line the boulevards: a memorial to former President José María Velasco Ibarra, a bust of Fyodor Dostoevsky, a statue of Hungarian poet Sándor Petőfi, memorials to Ecuadorian writers César Dávila Andrade and Jorge Carrera Andrade. In late 2016 the park's perimeter was rehabilitated for the Habitat III Conference, the UN's once-per-twenty-years summit on urban development, which Quito hosted that October. Accessibility routes were added. Sculptures restored. The old grazing ground, execution site, and burning place now doubles as one of Quito's most civilized public spaces.