Chilean firefighters were today battling rapidly expanding wildfires which officials fear have claimed around ten lives, prompting the president to declare a state of emergency.

About a dozen fires have raged since Friday.

The blazes are concentrated in the Vina del Mar and Valparaiso tourist regions, where they have ravaged thousands of hectares of forest, cloaked coastal cities in a dense fog of grey smoke and forced people to flee their homes.

“We have preliminary information that several people have died, around 10,” said Sofia Gonzales Cortes, state representative for the central region of Valparaiso.

In the towns of Estrella and Navidad, south-west of the capital Santiago, the fires have burned nearly 30 homes, and forced evacuations near the surfing resort of Pichilemu.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Yvonne Guzman, 63, told AFP. When the flames started to close in on her home in Quilpue, she fled with her elderly mother, only to find themselves trapped in traffic for hours.

“It’s very distressing, because we’ve evacuated the house but we can’t move forward. There are all these people trying to get out and who can’t move,” she said.

On Friday, Chile’s president Gabriel Boric decreed “a state of emergency due to catastrophe, in order to have all the necessary resources” to fight the fires.

“All forces are deployed in the fight against the forest fires,” he said.

Emergency services were set to meet this morning to assess the situation.

Around 7,000 hectares have already been burned in Valparaiso alone, according to Conaf, the Chilean national forest authority, which called the blazes “extreme”.

Images filmed by trapped motorists have gone viral online, showing mountains in flames at the end of the famous “Route 68”, a road used by thousands of tourists to get to the Pacific coast beaches.

On Friday, authorities closed the road, which links Valparaiso to Santiago, as a huge mushroom cloud of smoke “reduced visibility”.