A YOUNG ARGENTINIAN woman has survived a 23-storey fall from a hotel in downtown Buenos Aires, after a taxi broke her fall.

The woman, who the Global Post says has not been identified, had thrown herself off the hotel balcony in an apparent suicide bid – but her attempt failed, when a taxi caught in traffic below cushioned her fall.

The impact of her landing on the car shattered its windscreen and made a huge dent in its roof – but the impact was not hard enough to end her life.

Instead, AP reports, the 30-year-old woman was left with broken hips, ribs and significant internal bleeding.

The driver of the taxi, Miguel Cajal, told a local TV station that he noticed policemen stopping traffic as they were looking upward, and had jumped out of his car only by instinct.

“I got out of the car a second before. If I had not got out, I would have been killed,” the BBC quotes him as saying. The impact, he added, “made a terrible noise.”

Another taxi driver said he saw the woman stand at the railing of the balcony at the Hotel Crown Plaza Panamericano talking to another person, before she clambered over its railings and jumped off.