Flowered Desert
The small rains that sometimes fall in northern Chile, dress the Atacama desert in green, the driest in the world, turning it into a flowery garden with an explosion of vegetation and colors.
Climate change is contributing to the "Flowering Desert", as Chileans call it, an increasingly frequent phenomenon.
More than 200 species, most of them endemic, lurk beneath the dry land for years to emerge triumphant when the rain falls.
Some are simple seeds, others are bulbs, rhizomes, tubers. Others, like the argylia radiata, "is practically a tree under the ground with very extensive rhizomes."
Since the beginning of August, the procession of tourists and botanists begins to contemplate this unique spectacle, which begins north of La Serena (about 500 km north of Santiago) along 1,600 km towards the Peruvian and Bolivian borders.
Large spots of colors can already be seen, such as white, yellow or purple, the most typical.
There is a diversity of huillis (from white to lilac), añañucas (pink-white, yellow and red), nolanas (white, light blue and blue), cristarias (pale lilac), malvillas (white, pink and purple) and solanaceous.
"They are colored mantles, very small leaves that, depending on the amount of water, can grow more or less". When it rains a lot, a lot of grass comes out, dressing a landscape usually ocher in green.
- Floral compositions -
Sometimes one comes across authentic floral compositions where cacti, nolanas - a kind of inverted bell - 'guanaco legs' (Cistanthe grandiflora), the yellow flower of Argylia radiata, the 'carbonillo' (Cordia decandra), a shrub of large and abundant flowers that contrast with its dark foliage, and many other species become a feast of beauty and harmony.
Depending on whether it is coastal or inland desert, the surprises may be different, as well as the time of day. On a sunny day and at noon, the flowers will be fully open. If it is morning, cloudy, or dusk, they may not be seen.
The hills turn yellow thanks, among others, to the ‘rosita‘ Cruckshanksia and the Balbisia pencularis cover the entire coastal desert.
"The one that is very special is the‘ lion's claw ‘(Bomarea ovallei), typical of the coastal desert," although not all "events in the flowery desert are the same."
But the flowering desert does not live on plants alone. In the shade of this exuberant vegetation, you can find a great variety of birds, bees that come to suck the nectar from the flowers, lizards and insects.
The Atacama desert - the driest on the planet - is 180 km wide, it is sandwiched between the Andes mountain range and the Pacific Ocean.
In its entrails it hides mineral resources such as copper, of which Chile is the largest producer in the world with about a third of the production, iron, gold and silver, as well as important deposits of boron and lithium, sodium and potassium nitrate.
Source: * AFP Agency.