A window cleaner who fell 47 storeys from the top of a Manhattan tower block is now awake, talking, and expected to walk again after a recovery that doctors have called a "miracle".

Alcides Moreno, a 37-year-old Ecuadorean immigrant, fell almost 500 feet when the scaffolding beneath him collapsed just under one month ago on December 6.

Mr Moreno's 30-year-old half brother, Edgar, who was working with him, landed on a fence and died instantly as his body was cut in half, but Mr Moreno survived and was rushed to New York Presbyterian Hospital.

Dr Herbert Pardes, the president of the hospital, described Mr Moreno's condition on arrival as a "complete disaster".

Both legs, his right arm and his right wrist were broken. He had severe injuries to his chest, his abdomen and his spinal column and internal bleeding in his brain. He had to be given around 24 pints of blood and 19 pints of plasma.

His condition was so unstable that doctors did not even risk moving him to an operating theatre, instead performing the first surgery in his hospital bed. Mr Moreno had a further nine orthopaedic operations to piece together his broken body.

But at a press conference yesterday, doctors from the hospital spoke of his astonishing recovery. “If you are a believer in miracles, this would be one,” said the hospital’s chief of surgery, Dr Philip Barie.

The hospital has treated fall victims before but Dr Barie said: "Above ten storeys, most of the time we never see the patients because they're in the morgue.

“This is right up there with those anecdotes of people falling out of airplanes and surviving, people whose parachutes don’t open and somehow they manage to survive.

"We’re talking about tiny, tiny percentages, well under 1 per cent, of people who fall that distance and survive.”

Despite the odds, and the risk of complications from another spinal operation scheduled for today and further surgery to reconstruct his abdominal wall, Dr Barie said he believed that Mr Moreno would walk again. "Our goal is not just survival, but functional survival.

"We are very pleased - dare I say astonished? - at the level of recovery that this patient has enjoyed so far.”

Just one week after the accident, Mr Moreno began to move his arms and legs. He began reaching out and stroking his wife's face. Two weeks later, on Christmas Day, he stroked the wrong face.

“Apparently he tried to do it to one of the nurses,” Mr Moreno's wife, Rosario, 37, said. “I looked at him and said, ‘You’re not supposed to do that. I’m your wife, you touch your wife.’

Mr Moreno then spoke his first words since the accident.

“He turned around and, in English, said, ‘What did I do?’” she said. “It stunned me because I didn’t know he could speak.”

Mrs Moreno has kept a constant vigil by her husband's side for the past month. "They set up a room for me. They gave me a key," she said. "I shower here. They're very good to me," she said.

She said the couple's three children, Michael, 14, Mariah, 8, and Andrew, 6, had visited their father just once to prove to them that “unlike Edgar, he’s alive”.

Asked at the press conference how she thought her husband had survived such a fall, Mrs Moreno said he was "trained" and knew to lie flat and ride the platform down.

But, she added: "I told him, 'You're not going back to work there.'"

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