While hundreds of firefighters and water-bombing aircraft and helicopters battled the flames, a leading Spanish regional politician charged that many of the fires appeared to have been started deliberately.

Eighty fires were active Monday morning in the northwestern Spanish region of Galicia, two of which had been put on the highest level of alert, a local government spokesperson said, as 11 planes and three helicopters entered the battle along with troops.

The fire which killed the man at Campo Lameiro, near the northwestern city of Santiago de Compostela, has been raging since Friday and by Monday had ravaged more than 3,000 hectares (7,400 acres) of land.

The latest victim died trying to douse the flames as they came ever closer to his property.

"We suddenly lost all trace of him around five in the afternoon," local government sources said before adding that a charred corpse had been discovered shortly before midnight.

On Friday the bodies of two people killed by the same blaze were found in their car.

Galician regional president Emilio Perez Tourino, offering his condolences to the families of the victims, asserted that he had no doubt "the majority (of the fires) are caused by criminal means."

Over the weekend, dozens of residents of villages in the Galician region of Pontevedra had resorted to simple garden hoses and beating the flames with branches in a futile attempt to beat back the fires.

"What can we do? Our houses are in danger here," one woman told Spanish television.

Another fire destroyed more than 1,000 hectares of land at Ventallo in the northeastern region of Catalonia. Fires in that region, which requested help from French aircraft, forced a temporary closure of the highway going into France late Sunday.

In northern Portugal, meanwhile, six fires were out of control on Monday morning, with 600 firefighters mobilised, the national fire brigade said

At Valongo, near the northern city of Porto, scene of one major blaze, the Lusa news agency reported that "people are very frightened as the flames are approaching their houses."

Portugal has lost 870,000 hectares of forest land to fires in the past three years and the country has been on maximum alert since last Wednesday amid continuing high temperatures.

On Sunday temperatures reached 42 degrees Celsius (108 Fahrenheit) and were forecast to be 40 degrees on Monday.

Temperatures in Spain, where last year 11 volunteer firefighters were killed putting out a fire that destroyed 13,000 hectares (32,000 acres) of land near the central eastern city of Guadalajara, have remained slightly below those of the ferocious summer of 2003.

But widespread drought has left vast swathes of the country tinder-dry.

Last year, forest fires -- 700 in the month of June alone -- ravaged more than 160,000 hectares of land, the worst such destruction in a decade, during Spain's worst drought since 1947.

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