COPIAPÓ, Chile — A vast swathe of Chile's Atacama Desert is now a patchwork of pinks, yellows, lilacs and purples stretching across the craggy desert floor as far as the eye can see.
This winter, heavy rains brought by the El Niño super cycle caused flash floods in the Atacama Desert, with some areas receiving the heaviest rainfall since records began in the 1950s.
Floodwaters in July and August destroyed or damaged dozens of homes, forcing hundreds of people to evacuate.
But the floral bloom that followed has been the largest and most colorful in 30 years — and perhaps ever.
The rainwater penetrated deeper into the parched ground than it has in decades, allowing millions of seeds, bulbs and tubers to sprout above the surface. Many had lain dormant for decades under the sand.
More than 200 species are in flower. A month ago, the first plants to emerge created a pale-yellow haze. This was followed by a soft purple hue as other bulbs germinated. Now, almost every indentation and crevice in the desert is streaked with color.
Scientists studying the phenomenon say there are patches of desert in bloom where flowers have never previously been recorded, suggesting that bulbs have remained dormant there since before the phenomenon was first studied in detail in 1997.
"This is a natural seed bank, a dormant archive that becomes a living one with the rains," says Moisés Grimberg, the administrator of Llanos de Challe National Park.
"But it's a race against time — this brief biological window allows these species to complete their life cycle, which lasts roughly two to three months."
Llanos de Challe is a 113,000-acre national park along the arid coastline, where waves lap at pristine white sand beaches.
Grimberg says the park normally receives about 10,000 visitors a year. But with the desert in bloom, 15,000 tourists have visited over the last few weeks alone.
Across the desert, the roads are lined with tourists' cars. According to Chile's national tourism board, the region is expected to see around 300,000 overnight trips during the two months the desert is in bloom.
Among the star attractions are the nectar-filled, crimson flowers of the garra de león, with their long tails of flame-like green leaves. This endemic flower is coaxed out of dormancy by the rains and grows along just a few miles of this stretch of coastline in the Atacama Desert — nowhere else in the world.
This bloom occurs every few years in what is the driest nonpolar desert on Earth. But scientists say the phenomenon is becoming more frequent as changes in the climate bring unseasonal rains.
The phenomenon gives rise to a thriving, transient ecosystem, with insects hatching and attracting lizards and bats, as well as larger mammals such as the guanaco.
Biologists from INIA, Chile's national seed bank, are collecting specimens to analyze in their laboratory before the brief flowering season ends.
"It's very exciting," said Ana Sandoval as she delicately shook seeds free from their casings to take back to INIA's taxonomist at its base in northern Chile.
"It's as if the desert is awakening. Sometimes people think it's an empty, arid place, devoid of life, but actually our desert is just waiting for the right conditions, and any precipitation, to awaken it."
The seed bank wants to preserve the genetic material and unique adaptations each plant has developed to survive the extreme, arid conditions.
Sandoval points out different ways plants harvest water as she walks. Some leaves are covered in fine hairs; others have a thick waxy cuticle.
A national park dedicated to the desert bloom was created in June 2023 to protect a 141,000-acre area where flowers spring up every few years. Now local authorities want to go further.
Miguel Vargas, the governor of the Atacama region, is beginning the process of seeking UNESCO World Heritage recognition for the desert bloom phenomenon.
"This represents a tremendous opportunity to strengthen special interest tourism and diversify our regional economy, which is currently heavily reliant on mining," he said. "Receiving UNESCO recognition would put the Atacama region on the world stage."
Vargas hopes this will become Chile's eighth World Heritage site within a couple of years.
This year, the bloom is projected to last until mid-November.
