The world's driest desert is covered in flowers after the wettest winter in decades. Some 200 species of flowers are bursting from the sand after five times the annual rainfall in just one month.

Flowers bloom on the desert in the Llanos de Challe national park, at the doors of the Atacama desert, 600 km north of Santiago, Chile. [China Daily]

At the Llanos de Challes National Park, in the Atacama desert some 600 kilometers north of Santiago, flowers seem to be everywhere, emerging from the sand, around cacti, even seeming to sprout out of rocks.

The average rainfall in the Atacama is normally one millimeter a year, and rain has never been recorded in parts of the desert. The sparse plant life in the coastal desert ecosystem normally gets just enough water to survive in the humidity from the thick ocean fog that rolls into the region.

However the El Nino weather phenomenon, which alters rain patterns along the Pacific coast of South America every six or seven years, has brought enough rainfall for the bulbs and rhizomes that lay dormant under the desert surface for decades to germinate.

"This year has been exceptional, there has been more than 50 mm of rain," Llanos de Challes park director Carla Louit said.

"Flowers begin to grow with 15 mm of rain per year, and this year all the species have grown," said Louit.

Rainfall is key for a desert bloom, but there are other factors: The rain must fall at regular intervals, not too heavily or too infrequently. Plus, there cannot be a freeze during the southern hemisphere's winter that would destroy the plants.

If all these conditions are met, a desert bloom can last from September to December.

"The last time there were so many flowers was in 1989," marveled Padre Lucio, an amateur botanist and priest in the nearby town. "There have been desert blooms since then, but never like this one."

Some 45,000 hectares of desert was set aside for a national park in 1994 to protect the area from mining, the main industry in northern Chile.

A park security guard named Yohan said there are more than 200 species of native flowers "that grow nowhere else in the world" at Llanos de Challes, "and 14 are at risk of extinction".

Yohan is especially angered by visitors who uproot flowers to take home "because they believe that they will grow there, but evidently they never grow".

Threatened flora include the Lion's Claw (Leontochir ovallei), a spectacular red flower with a large and luscious petals. The flower is especially rare because their bulbs are buried deep below the surface, and a heavy rainfall is needed for them to emerge.

Louit says that she has only five guards to protect the whole park, so she focuses on educating visitors.

She also said there were few scientific studies on the blooming desert phenomenon that would help shape a conservation program. "There are no government resources to study such a sporadic phenomenon," she said.

The blooming desert is also largely unknown by the general public. This year only 1,200 Chileans and 64 foreigners registered to visit the park, Louit said.

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