A man has died after being run over by a bulldozer he was operating while fighting wildfires in Portugal, bringing the death toll in the country to three, officials said.

A heatwave is continuing to affect the Iberian Peninsula. Thousands of firefighters have been deployed to battle ongoing blazes and towns have been evacuated. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez visited affected regions to meet with the heads of emergency teams.

The fires have ravaged small, sparsely populated towns in the country's northwest, forcing locals in many cases to act as firefighters. About 2,382 square miles have burned across Spain and Portugal.

In neighbouring Portugal, where fires are also blazing, another firefighter was killed on Sunday in a "tragic" traffic accident, President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa said. Fires have also broken out in Greece, France, Turkey and the Balkans as a heatwave has scorched swathes of southern Europe.

The fires in Spain this year have burned 158,000 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.

More than 343,000 hectares of land – the equivalent of nearly half a million football pitches – destroyed this year in Spain, in new record.

Spanish and Portuguese authorities, backed by Europol, have seized more than seven tonnes of clams unfit for human consumption and arrested 11 suspects accused of making at least

Europe has been warming twice as fast as the global average since the 1980s, making the region more vulnerable to wildfires.