A woman with a hose tries to put out a fire in Santa Baia De Montes, northwestern Spain.

Madrid: Firefighters in Spain, Portugal and Greece continued to battle wildfires on Friday on a public holiday in all three countries as persistent hot, dry conditions challenged efforts to contain the blazes. Spain was fighting 14 major fires. Temperatures were expected to climb over the weekend.

“Today will again be a very tough day, with an extreme risk of new fires,” Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez wrote on X. The national weather agency AEMET warned of extreme fire risk in the country, including where the largest blazes were burning in the north and west. A heat wave which brought temperatures exceeding 40°C on several days this month was expected to last through Monday. 

Fires in the Galicia region forced the closure of several highways. The high speed rail line connecting it to Spain’s capital, Madrid, remained suspended. The fires in Spain this year have burned 1,58,000 hectares or 610 square miles, according to the European Union's European Forest Fire Information System. That is an area roughly as big as metropolitan London.

In both Spain and Portugal it was the Feast of the Assumption, a major Catholic holiday usually marked by family gatherings and religious processions. In Portugal, nearly 4,000 firefighters were battling seven major fires. Authorities extended the state of alert until Sunday, amid high temperatures expected to last through the weekend.

A wildfire in Greece burned out of control for a fourth day on the island of Chios, prompting several more overnight evacuations. Two water-dropping planes and two helicopters were operating in the north of the island in the eastern Aegean Sea, where authorities said a lull in high winds was helping firefighters early Friday.