It wasn’t raining when Caroline Doyle left her home in central Valencia on Tuesday morning.

A red warning for rain was active, so she took her jacket as a precaution.

The Australian English teacher returned home 24 hours later from the town of Paiporta caked in mud.

“It felt like we were in a movie with special effects … it just seemed unbelievable”.

At least 205 people have been killed in the flooding, which has been described as Europe’s worst natural disaster in five decades.

Search and rescue efforts are ongoing, with another 500 soldiers joining the search for those missing on Friday, local time.

Spanish authorities expect the number of dead to rise and have set up a temporary morgue in a convention centre in the outskirts of Valencia.

On Friday, some 75,000 people remained without power and some areas were still cut off from outside help.

As the clean-up continued, people like Ms Doyle and communities like Paiporta were still struggling to comprehend the disaster.

Spanish floods like a ‘tsunami’

As water flooded the streets near the school where she taught on Tuesday night, Ms Doyle was forced to take shelter in a local woman’s apartment.

Two of her students, whose parents could not collect them before the flooding began, joined her.

They thought the rain would pass quickly, but were forced to watch the devastation unfold in the streets below.

“We heard the boom of the doors of the house being ripped off in front of us and the water just flooding in,” she said.

“It just looked like the tsunami [in Indonesia] from 2004.”

She said the flooding was ankle deep by 6:30pm.

“We were all sent alerts to our cell phones from the government about 8:10pm telling us not to go outside and we looked outside and thought, ‘Well, we can’t go outside, so thank you for telling us,'” she said.

The next day, once the worst had passed, the group tried to return to their homes using the metro, but it was out of action.

The only way to get home was to walk for almost two hours back to central Valencia.

“We would walk down one street but … [realise] it’s blocked by piles and piles of cars,” she said.

Paiporta has a population of about 25,000 people.

It has recorded at least 62 flood-related deaths.

Clean-up underway as more rain warnings issued

Ms Doyle said locals were doing everything they could in the most trying of circumstances to help.

Water, food and urgent supplies are being stockpiled in Valenica for places like Paiporta, but the goods can still only be taken to affected communities on foot or by bike.

There are so many volunteers wanting to help people in Paiporta that Spanish authorities have asked them not to drive there so emergency services have access to the few clear roads.

But as the clean-up continued on Friday, the Spanish weather agency issued alerts for strong rains in other parts of the country, including Tarragona in Catalonia, Huelva, on the south-west coast and parts of the Balearic Islands.

Days since the disaster, Ms Doyle was still in shock.

“I spent seven years living in Latin America and I never thought living in Spain I would experience something like this. Never,” she said.

“I still cannot believe the devastation here. It’s just out of this world.”