The first sign of trouble Peter Hughes noticed was when his train to Madrid starting to slow down.

Then the TV monitor and lights went off. Emergency lights switched on, but did not last, and the locomotive ground to a halt.

Four hours later, Mr Hughes was still stuck on the train 200 kilometres (124 miles) outside of Spain’s capital. He had food and water, but the toilets were not working.

“It will be getting dark soon and we could be stuck here for hours,” he told the BBC.

The massive power cut that stranded Mr Hughes triggered chaos across Spain and Portugal, and also impacted Andorra and parts of France, from about midday local time (10:00 GMT).

Traffic lights shut off. Metros closed. Businesses shuttered and people joined queues to get cash as card payments did not work.

Jonathan Emery was on a different train halfway between Seville and Madrid when the cuts hit.

For an hour, he sat on the train, the doors closed, until people could pry them open to let in ventilation. Half an hour later, passengers left, only to find themselves stranded.

That was when people from local villages started coming and dropping off supplies – water, bread, fruit.

“Nobody is charging for anything, and word must be getting around in the local town because people just keep coming,” he said.

In Madrid, Hannah Lowney was half way through scanning her grocery shopping at Aldi when the power went out.

People were coming out of their offices and walking home because they could not tell when the buses were coming, Ms Lowney said in a voice message sent to BBC Radio 5 Live.

“It’s a bit disconcerting that it’s the whole country, I’ve never experienced this before,” she said.

Mark England was eating lunch in the restaurant of the hotel where is staying on holiday in Benidorm when “everything went off and the fire alarm started going off and the fire doors started closing”.

In an international school in Lisbon, the electricity flickered on and off for a while, then gave up, teacher Emily Thorowgood said.

She kept teaching in the dark, the children in good spirits, but lots of parents were taking their children out of school, she said.

After Mr Gladden’s phone signal returned after about two hours, he and others ventured out to cafes, but found “nothing is working – we came to get some food and a drink but they can’t cook without electricity”.

Within two hours, Spanish power grid operator Red Electrica said it was beginning to recover power in the north and south of the country.

But two-and-a-half hours after the cuts, Madrid’s mayor José Luis Martínez-Almeida still urged all residents to “keep their movements to an absolute minimum and, if at all possible, to remain where they are”, in a video recorded from the city’s integrated emergency security centre.

At 15:00 local time, Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez pulled together an “extraordinary” meeting of Spain’s national security council.

Red Electrica CEO Eduardo Prieto said at a news conference shortly afterwards that it could take “between six and ten hours” to restore power.

Just before 16:00, electricity flicked back on in Malaga. By 17:00, the grid operator said power was being restored “in several areas of the north, south and west of the [Iberian] peninsula”.

Portugal’s power firm REN gave a more dire prediction, saying that it could “take up to a week” before the network was back to normal.