"Ebola came and killed the gorillas, but some are still alive and today they are coming back," said Boniface Edzebe, head of a group of 21 owners of the park in the Congo Republic, smaller western neighbour of the vast Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in the heart of Africa.

Ebola, an incurable haemorrhagic fever, has in three years wiped out 80 percent of central Africa's lowland gorillas registered as living in the 320 square kilometre (128 sq mile) sanctuary.

When it first struck in November 2001, 139 of the great apes were reported missing.

Many local tribespeople also died from the disease when they handled and ate the flesh of dead gorillas.

Spanish primatologist Magdalena Bermejo also put her faith in the gorillas returning, relaunching a process of "habituation", which allows tourists to observe the apes in their natural surroundings, with four new groups of gorillas.

But her efforts were in vain.

Within nine months those gorillas too died from Ebola.

"In the space of two weeks, 70 percent of this group died," she said.

Only solitary male gorillas seem to have survived, and today they are starting to reappear in areas ravaged by Ebola.

And that, for the owners of the park, means the tourists might return, after heavy financial losses caused by Ebola, as the special watchtowers built for tourists waiting to see the gorillas stand empty, with the last takings from tourism registered on June 21, 2002.

With only a meagre livelihood from renting out houses to field staff from the European Union and the Congolese government, villagers are strapped for the money to buy pharmaceuticals they themelves need.

"All these problems have left us poor," said one of the owners, Michel Azzangot.

Primatologist Bermejo remains determined to mate gorillas and encourage tourism.

But after two failed attempts at habituating the gorillas in the Lossi sanctuary, even she has moved on to another site at Odzala National Park to try and revive the Lossi reserve experience there.

There is no known cure for the disease, whose symptoms are high fever, diarrhea, bleeding from the nose and gums, and which can induce massive internal hemorrhages.

Odzala-Kokoua game reserve is one of the oldest in Africa, set up as far back as 1935. It employs 111 people and provides major support to the economy of Mbomo, an isolated region lacking in basic facilities.

Since Ebola struck in Congo and in neighbouring Gabon in 2001, tourists have made themselves scarce from Mboko, the base camp that is the gateway to Odzala National Park.

Nearby, a scientific team has set up its own camp to compile all the data acquired in the bush.

All these infrastructures have been developed since 1992, when the Congolese ministry for water and forests started cooperation with Ecofac.

At Odzala, buffaloes and crocodiles survive and thrive -- but Ebola has caught up with the gorillas, the magnet attraction for tourists from all over the world.

"The great thing about Odzala-Kokoua is that it is -- or was, we no longer know because of Ebola -- the zone of greatest density for plains gorillas and probably also of bush elephants in the whole of central Africa," said Conrad Aveling, the central African coordinator of Ecofac, the European Union programme managing this vast 13,456 square kilometre (5,200 square mile) reserve in tandem with Congolese authorities.

At a distance of 500 kilometres (300 miles) from the capital Brazzaville, the animals are attracted here by the many swampy clearings and maranta (arrowroot) forest that remained largely inviolate until the arrival of poachers in search of ivory tusks, and of the Ebola curse -- thus sadly reducing the stock of the two jewels in the crown.

All rights reserved. � 2005 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.