The fire, whose causes were as yet unknown, started on Friday afternoon in the Portbou area, on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, and was reported as having already burnt some 435 hectares of land by Saturday morning. 

After the Catalan fire service ordered people not to leave the village of Colera and the nearby Sant Miquel campsite on Friday evening, at least 135 locals were evacuated overnight as a precautionary measure as the flames had edged closer to residential areas. 

Catalan Red Cross volunteers aided the evacuation.

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The wildfire left around 4,000 people in the Portbou area without running water and electricity, which resulted in the town council requesting the dispatch of tanker trucks according to local media reports. 

Large swathes of the affected area were also said to have no phone service.

With respect to road damage, the fire forced the closure of a section of the N-260 highway (which connects Portbou to the Huesca province to the east) and caused a temporary stop to rail services between Figueres and Portbou.

Some 80 Catalan firefighting units were reportedly fighting the blaze on multiple fronts on Saturday, with a dozen fire engines from the French side of the border providing additional support.

The strong northerly winds that had helped the blaze spread overnight continued to prevent water-bombing planes from taking off on Saturday morning, while ground operations were simultaneously being hindered by the area’s rough terrain.

“It is a very complex fire,” Jordi Martín, chief of the Girona county fire department, told national newspaper El País.

The Catalan fire service said it expected airborne operations to be able to start on Saturday afternoon following a helicopter reconnaissance.

Their most immediate priority was to prevent the blaze from encroaching into the tourist resort of Llanca, south of Portbou.

At the time of writing, no residential buildings were being directly threatened by the flames.

Last year, some 500 blazes laid waste to more than 300,000 hectares in Spain, a record for Europe according to data from the European Forest Fire Information System (Effis).

This year has so far seen some 70,000 hectares destroyed.