A British woman has described how she and her husband escaped death by a whisker as flood waters in Spain swept away cars all around them.
Torrential rains have caused devastating floods in the eastern province of Valencia, killing at least 95 people.
The floods are the worst the country has experienced in decades, with the death toll expected to rise further.
Karen Loftus, 62, and her husband were driving on the AP-7 motorway, as they headed back to their home in Alicante at 6pm on Tuesday.
All of a sudden, traffic came to a standstill before, to their horror, they saw a bridge ahead being washed away by raging flood waters and a lorry disappearing into the river.
Within ten minutes, water had surrounded the cars on the motorway and begun to seep into the vehicles, causing panic and mayhem.
Unable to open their car doors due to the pressure of the water, people resorted to smashing their vehicle’s windows to escape.
Ms Loftus said her car started to float and crashed into a lorry, at which point she and her husband decided to flee – a move that could have saved their lives.
Grabbing their passports and phones, they squeezed out of the window of their car and waded through chest-deep water.
“Just after we got out of the car, another car floated on top of our car,” she told Sky News.
“It was raging, cars were floating about, people were screaming.”
Fearing that they could be washed away by water pouring from a ravine, they made their way in the darkness to a lorry.
The “fantastic” Moroccan driver took them on board and drove through “five feet of water” to get them to safety.
Ms Loftus said it had been like being in “disaster movie” and that they had feared for their lives.
She said they were “lucky to be alive”, adding: “There are many families that aren’t in our position.
“If we’d just stayed in the car I don’t know what would’ve happened.”
