Sleeping beauty awakens in La Silla

ESO’s La Silla Observatory is located on the outskirts of the Chilean Atacama Desert, 600 km north of Santiago de Chile and at an altitude of 2400 metres. As ESO’s first observatory, it has been seeing wonders in the night sky ever since it started operations in the 1960s, but sometimes it also gets to see wonderful things right at its doorstep. 

The Atacama Desert is the driest place on Earth outside the polar regions in terms of average rainfall. But when rain does fall, complemented by the right temperature and sunlight, it can trigger something spectacular: over 200 different plant species, whose seeds and bulbs lie dormant in the ground during the dry periods, start to bloom. Soon, hundreds of kilometres of otherwise sandy, rocky, and barren desert are covered in purple, pink, and yellow flowers — a phenomenon called “desierto florido” (the flowering desert).

Since the weather conditions have to be just right, this phenomenon only happens every few years, normally between September and November — springtime in Chile. The photo above shows the “superbloom” of October 2022, which was also the first bloom in five years. This event inspired the government of Chile to create a national park in the province of Copiapó, further north in Chile, to protect this spectacular show of nature — and the night sky above it.