A three-year-old girl has been rescued from a deep well in Argentina, after a lengthy ordeal mostly broadcast live on television.
Vanessa Mamani is now recovering in hospital at Florencio Varela, 25km south of Buenos Aires. She fell down a 30m deep well used by farmers that was hidden by bushes in a field in Pilares, near Florencio Varela.
The well had a 35cm diameter, too narrow for an adult to be lowered in to pull her out. Her plight soon drew more than 200 rescue workers, including police and fire fighters.
Television networks followed the seven hour rescue in real time via a small camera linked to a fibre optic cable that attached to a special harness rescuers lowered into the well.
The girl is under medical observation but suffers only "from a state of shock and at present is doing fine," hospital director Arnaldo Medina told reporters.
"It was a miracle," President Cristina Kirchner said of the rescue last night after visiting Vanessa in hospital. "She got out and screamed as if she had just been born.”