The Atacama Desert is a record-breaking place. Not so much for its size: its 128,000 km2 of surface area place it in the top 20 of the largest deserts in the world, but far from the top positions. However, it is the driest desert on the planet, at least among the non-polar ones: every year it receives around 15 mm of rainfall on average, which in the central areas is reduced to 1 or 2 mm at most.
Yet even in such a dry place, apparent “miracles” happen every now and then: this year too, as happened in 2025, Atacama has become a flower garden, as also proudly announced by the local authorities. The reason? Every now and then, even in the driest place on the planet it rains for a long time.
From desert to garden
The Atacama Desert is a so-called “fog desert”, a desert in which most of the water available to plants and animals is in the form of droplets in the fog. It’s normal when there is so little rain, yet this year, also due to the now infamous super El Niño, Atacama has been submerged in water, with areas of the desert seeing 180mm of rain fall in just a few weeks.
The result was an exceptional bloom, which reveals one of the Atacama’s best-kept secrets: it is home to nearly 2,000 different plant species (1,893, to be precise), which spend much of their lives in a state of quiescence. Some of these plants can wait up to 10 years for a few drops of water to arrive. They do this thanks to specific adaptations for such an inclement climate, from protective layers of wax that serve to retain little moisture to root systems specialized in finding water in the desert.
When it starts to rain, the Atacama plants wake up en masse: according to local authorities, this year’s flowering could cover 15,000 km2.
More and more frequent blooms
The Atacama blooms reveal, among other things, the beauty of the flowers that survive in the desert, which are often very colourful: the local authorities focus heavily on this aspect to encourage tourism in the area. An increasingly successful strategy: in the last forty years there have been 15 exceptional flowering events in Atacama, four of which in the last 10 years alone.
The most recent was just last year: it is the first time that Atacama has seen two such blooms in two consecutive years. A unique spectacle in the world, which is however also a worrying indicator of climate change.
Furthermore, the exceptional rains have already contributed to triggering a series of floods, inundations and landslides which unfortunately have caused at least 13 deaths and 4 thousand families displaced among the Chilean population. In short, the wonder of the flowery desert unfortunately hides a much more complex and less reassuring reality.
