Residents and volunteers from the Valencia region have demanded more help from the military and regional and national governments to clear the damage and destruction caused by the deadly floods that have swamped many towns.
Yesterday, the mass spontaneous arrival of volunteers complicated access for professional emergency workers to some areas, prompting authorities to devise a plan on how and where to deploy them.
However, residents said volunteers were well organised and demanded more hands to clean up the mud.
Local shop owner Emilia, who is 74, asked "where is the army to help us?"
"I have a bodega that needs to be drained of all the water and there is no way out. I have told many people and they have not paid any attention.
"Where is the help that we have to have? Where is the army? Where are all these people? The houses are collapsing and they don't pay attention to us."
Asked if she felt abandoned, she said: "We feel abandoned, there are many people who need help. It is not only my house, is all the houses and we are throwing away furniture, we are throwing away everything.
"When is the help going to come to have fridges and washing machines, because we can't even wash our clothes and we can't even have a shower? This is a disaster."
Nurse Maria Jose Gilabert, 52, said people are "devastated".
"Because there is not much light to be seen here at the moment, not because they are not coming to help, they are coming from all over Spain, but because it will be a long time before this becomes a habitable area again."
Local resident Ramon Felguera said there was "a human tide coming this way" in relation to volunteers.
"There are no words of thanks to these people. There are no words of thanks to these people. We have to appreciate what they are doing."
In some of the worst-hit areas, people have resorted to looting because they have no food or water.
Police said they had arrested 27 people for robbing shops and offices in the Valencia area.
More than 90% of the households in Valencia had regained power yesterday, utility Iberdrola said, though thousands still lacked electricity in cut-off areas that rescuers struggled to reach.
Some 2,000 soldiers were deployed to search for people who are still missing and help survivors of the storm, which triggered a new weather alert in the Balearic Islands, Catalonia and Valencia, where rains are expected to continue during the weekend.
Officials said the death toll is likely to keep rising. It is already Spain's worst flood-related disaster in more than five decades and the deadliest to hit Europe since the 1970s.
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