These photos were taken on September 29th, 2002, just one month after the big snow storm described in the gallery about Snow in La Silla. This was a rainy winter so it created excellent conditions for the phenomenum called "the blossoming desert" (desierto florido). Images were taken with a polarizer filter to make the colors more intense, except for the 3 last ones taken on November 24th, with a Canon camera instead of my Olympus.
I keep the original 5 megapixels photos in case you want the high resolution version.