Atacama Desert, the Driest Place on Earth Covered with Pink Floral Beds

"There's a lot of interest in seeing it", said Daniel Diaz, director of the National Tourism Service for Atacama region.

The amount seems insignificant but it is considered huge for the desert, amounting to more than 14 years worth of rain in 24 hours.

From violet-and-white Chilean bell flowers, or "countryside sighs" (Nolana paradoxa), to red "lion claws" (Bomarea ovallei), to yellow Rhodophiala rhodolirion, they have filled the normally pale desert valleys with rivers of color.

You wouldn't usually describe the Atacama desert - the driest place on Earth - as vibrant with life and colourful.

It's for the first time in the country's history that the land located north of Santiago de Chile has been covered twice in a year in blooming mallows.

"The intensity of blooms this year has no precedent", Diaz said.

This beauty brought along with huge pain as heavy rainstorms in March and August caused mudslides and floods, killing 28 people in the country and left thousands of others homeless, global news agency EFE reported.

"It occurred in a very particular way because we have not had such a large flowering in the past 18 years". Experts say that the strong rains are behind this year's particularly gorgeous natural event.

Arica, Chile, which in northern Atacama has the world's record for longest period of no rain having gone 173 straight months will not one drop of rain during the early part of the 20th century.

Judging from their past behavior, it appears that flowers only bloom in the Atacama Desert once in five to seven years. El Niño - meaning in Spanish "the little boy, or Christ child" - is created when the equatorial waters of the Pacific Ocean warm significantly.

An estimated 20,000 tourists are expected to travel to the Atacama to see the blossoming for their own eyes before the landscape returns to its normal form in November.