Piercing blue skies and a blazing sun, normally the delight of summer tourists, cast a long shadow across Europe Saturday as punishing heat and fires responsible for dozens of deaths showed little sign of letting up.
The record-breaking heat could endure for another week, experts warned, while Europeans scrambled to find respite in the sea, underground catacombs and the relative cool of night.
Europe, which has suffered Sahara-like weather that regularly topped 40?C over the past week "could see a drop in temperatures from Aug. 15," said Dominique Escale, meteorologist for France's national weather service Meteo France.
In two weeks of an uninterrupted heat wave, the summer death toll has climbed to 39 in three countries.
Fast-moving fires in France and Portugal, kicked up by a deadly combination of drought, heat, human error and crime, have killed 20, while Spain on Saturday recorded its 19th death from heat-related illnesses when a 75-year-old woman died in a hospital of the southern province of Andalucia.
Firefighters have deployed in battalions of thousands, while high-risk forests are under soldiers' watch and zoo animals are being treated to frozen treats and fish trapped in ice cubes.
Meanwhile, blazes have ripped into chic French resort towns, parched Iberian brushland and even Croatian minefields -- all explosive situations triggering panic over the loss of life and livelihood alike.
Portuguese authorities said cooler nighttime temperatures and some humidity had helped reign in all but one of the wildfires, the worst on the continent.
But more than 2,000 firefighters, aided by some 800 soldiers, were still either battling existing fires or were monitoring forests for signs of new blazes, especially in light of possible electrical storms and continued high daytime temperatures.
Roughly 200,000 hectares of woodland have been lost to flames so far this year, most of it since last month, according to the latest forest service estimate released on Friday.
In France, police arrested five people including a 17-year-old girl in connection with a blaze which destroyed three hectares of brush and trees on the outskirts of the southern Riviera resort of Nice overnight.
Scores of residents and tourists were evacuated from hillside villas east of the town, while Russian helicopters were brought in to douse the blaze before it was brought under control.
Spain is running short of ice as the heat wave suffocates the country and ice machines struggle to keep up.
"Our reserves have practically run out ... and when temperatures go above 40?C the machines produce less," Ricardo Lasco, manager of Madrid's round-the-clock ice factory Todohielo, said.
The heat wave has been caused by an anti-cyclone which has anchored itself firmly over the west European land mass, holding off rain-bearing depressions over the Atlantic and funnelling hot air north from Africa.
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