Much of Europe baked in tropical temperatures that climbed as high as 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit), in an increasingly dangerous heatwave blamed for at least four deaths since Sunday.

In Spain, a 44-year-old man died of heat exhaustion at Orense, in the northwestern region of Galicia, regional government officials said Tuesday, two days after another man died in Murcia in the south.

The other two deaths blamed on the oppressive heat were recorded in France. In in the southwest Bordeaux region, where the temperature climbed to 38 C, local authorities reported that two octogenarians were the victims of hyperthermia.

An 85-year-old man died in hospital and a woman, 81, at her home.The high temperatures revived the spectre of the 2003 heatwave, which killed 30,000 people in Europe, around 15,000 of them in France. The Netherlands, Finland , Britain, Italy and Sweden have all reported unusually hot weather.