Atacama Desert blooms in historic display as super El Niño brings rare rains

The Atacama Desert, Earth's driest nonpolar desert, has turned into something almost no one alive has seen before. Stretching 1,600 kilometers down Chile's northern coast between the Pacific Ocean and the Andes Mountains, the Atacama spent decades as a landscape of rocky, brownish dunes—a place so barren that most people's image of it was simply brown. But this October, after record rainfall swept through the region in July and August, more than 200 plant species have erupted across 17,000 square kilometers of the desert floor in what Chileans call a Desierto Florido, or flowering desert. The display is so extensive it covers an area roughly the size of the Santiago Metropolitan Region, the country's largest and most populous area.

The rainfall that triggered this transformation was extraordinary by any measure. Between July and August, Chile recorded precipitation levels that had never been documented since measurements began in the 1950s. Some locations received 160 to 190 millimeters of rain—figures that Cesar Pizarro, a biologist and head of the Biodiversity Conservation Section at Chile's National Forest Corporation, described as the most significant on record in terms of volume. The storms were driven by what scientists call a super El Niño, a climate phenomenon that causes sharp rises in global temperatures and has been growing increasingly intense. While these same storms caused flooding and devastation in other parts of Chile, in the north they activated something dormant beneath the desert floor.

The mechanism is biological and patient. The Atacama's germplasm—seeds, bulbs, tubers, and even the eggs of invertebrates and reptiles—can remain dormant for decades, waiting for the rare moment when enough water arrives to make growth possible. Some of the flowers now blooming emerged from seeds that had lain inactive for 30 to 40 years. Jorge Carabantes, head of the Protected Areas Department at the National Forest Corporation, called it a unique phenomenon. "There are more than 200 plant species," he said. "This is a flowering event that is obviously extraordinary and unusual, very different from other blooms that occur elsewhere on the globe." The result is a visual transformation: red and yellow nanucas, purple rock purslane, white suspiros, orange terciopelos, and the native garra de leon—one of the desert's most iconic species—have turned the hills, plains, and ravines into a carpet of color.

For people who have never seen the Atacama in bloom, the sight carries an almost disorienting power. Felix Banda, 51, was born in Chile but has lived his entire life in Australia. When he visited the Atacama for the first time this year, he arrived expecting to see some greenery after hearing about the heavy rains. "I always thought it was just going to be brown," he said. "That's my image of a desert, just brown. But this is an incredible landscape." Chef Franco Moya, 37, traveled nearly 1,000 kilometers from Santa Cruz in central Chile's Colchagua Valley with his girlfriend to celebrate his birthday among the flowers. "It was striking to see how the flowers grow in such a dry place," he said. "It's my first time here, and it was a truly surprising moment."

The phenomenon has become a major draw. According to data provided to the Associated Press by Chile's National Tourism Secretariat, the Atacama region is expected to receive nearly 300,000 overnight trips by the time the flowering ends in November, positioning the Desierto Florido as one of the region's main tourist attractions this season. Tourists are venturing into remote and inhospitable areas of the desert to witness what Conaf projects will be the most intense and extensive flowering desert since 1997. The display will not last. By November, as the Southern Hemisphere's spring turns toward summer and the desert's moisture evaporates, the flowers will fade and the Atacama will return to its familiar brown. But for now, in this moment shaped by a super El Niño and decades of dormant potential, the world's driest nonpolar desert is alive with color.