Left panel: a series of synthetic SFH and metallicity functions are shown. The thin (black) lines are always the SFH and metallicity function of a field of the LMC bar, as derived from Holtzman et al. (1999). The thick (red) lines and the histograms show the values used to simulate the synthetic populations in order to find the best model that matches our observations. Right panel: synthetic I, I − K_s CMDs for different SFHs and metallicity functions, given in left panels. The number of the model is specified in each single panel as it is referred to in the text and in Tables 3 and 4.