The Esquina del Coco: A Tree and a Grid

The Esquina del Coco, the Coconut Corner, is the corner of Calle Sucre and Calle Oviedo in central Ibarra, a short walk from the cathedral on Parque Pedro Moncayo. It is a small plazoleta, and it is the fourth stop of the White City walk. It matters for one fact and one story, and the point of this piece is to keep the two apart.

The fact: the grid starts here

In the small hours of 16 August 1868 an earthquake on the Otavalo fault threw Ibarra down. Gabriel García Moreno, sent to run the relief, reported fifteen to twenty thousand dead in the province. The survivors lived for about four years on the plain of Santa María de la Esperanza and came back on 28 April 1872, a day the city still marks as El Retorno.

The town they came back to was laid out new. In 2016 Fanny Cisneros, in charge of the museum at the Centro Cultural Ibarra, told El Telégrafo that the rebuilding began at the corner of Oviedo and Sucre: García Moreno had the new town drawn on a grid from this corner, with streets thirteen metres wide. The local cultural manager Jorge Luis Narváez adds, in an account published by La Hora in 2025, that he used Spanish blocks and European criteria and meant it as a city for whites. Either way, this corner is where the rebuilt city's geometry is said to begin.

The story: a palm that stood

The name comes from the tradition that a coconut palm on this corner survived the earthquake and served as the reference point for the new grid. That is how the story is told in the press, but no document from 1872 has been found to confirm it, and the survival of the palm rests on tradition. So does much of what is said about the tree: no source supports the stories that a Mercedarian friar planted the original, that the present tree descends from it through a chain of replantings, or that touching it grants a wish.

Even the botany is open. Whether the palm standing today is a true coconut, and how old it is, has not been confirmed, so treat the name as a name.

What to look for

Stand in the plazoleta and look at the street plan rather than the tree. The streets run straight from here, and the new town's blocks were measured out on that plan. Across Oviedo stands the museum known by the name of the Central Bank of Ecuador, with pre-Hispanic ceramics and gold and religious painting; check its hours before you go. In 2016 a statue of García Moreno stood on the corner, and whether it is still there is something to see for yourself.

The corner even gave its name to an opera. In December 2025 an opera called Esquina del Coco was staged in the restored old school on the main square, two stops earlier on the walk, with tickets at two dollars.

The point the corner makes on the walk is simple. Ibarra was not patched up after 1868. It was laid out again, from a corner, on a plan, and the story of the palm is how the city remembers where that plan began.