By: Luis Pellegrini
The Atacama Desert is one of the most magical, beautiful, and unusual places in the world. I've visited it several times, and I've always been amazed by its beauty. But it was always a dry beauty, because the Atacama, with its 105 square kilometers of empty immensity between Chile and Peru, receives an average of only 15 millimeters of rain per year. This makes it one of the driest and most inhospitable places on the planet. However, even in the Atacama, where sand, rocks, and salt mines are the dominant elements, it's possible to witness, once every 6-7 years, a miracle of nature. The sky suddenly fills with clouds, downpours bathe the land, and a few days later, a spectacular bloom transforms this lunar landscape into a colorful alpine meadow.
Typically, this is what the Atacama Desert looks like: dry, desolate, and entirely tinged with the fullest palette of ochres, yellows, and browns.
The credit goes to the early spring rainfall, which periodically occurs in exceptional abundance and, on those rare occasions, allows the seeds of more than 200 species of flowers to bloom at the same time, as if touched by some magic wand.
This year, the spectacle of the Atacama Desert's flowering occurred much earlier than usual, attracting thousands of tourists armed with cell phones and cameras.
This year's flowering is exceptional not only because of the anomalous period in which it occurs, but also because it follows the previous flowering, which took place in 2015, less than 24 months later. Check out a small photo gallery of this flowering below, and don't miss the beautiful video that concludes the article. To travel on the Wings of Time – the new section of this website.
GALLERY:
Video: Atacama in bloom (Preferably view in full screen)