A crowd of furious flood survivors threw mud and shouted insults at King Felipe VI as he visited a devastated town in Spain’s Valencia region.

The monarch was accompanied by government officials who tried to talk to locals in Paiporta, which experienced around a year’s worth of rain on Tuesday.

Protesters were seen throwing handfuls of mud, stones, and a glass jar towards the king and his entourage.

The monarch later asked his officials to close their umbrellas so he could speak to groups of angry residents who survived Tuesday’s floods.

Spanish police were then forced to step in with officers on horseback keeping the crowd away from the king.

At least 211 people have died so far, nearly all of which have been in the Valencia region, where thousands of security and emergency services frantically cleared debris and mud in the search for bodies.

Describing “the worst natural disaster in the recent history of our country,” Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said it was the second deadliest flood in Europe this century.

The monarch’s visit came as Spain’s meteorological agency issued a fresh warning for heavy downpours in the Valencia region.

Up to 100 litres per square metre of water could fall in the province of Castellón and the area surrounding the city of Valencia, the agency forecast.

It also sounded the alarm for torrential rain that may cause flooding in the southern province of Almería, advising residents not to travel unless strictly necessary.

Restoring order and distributing aid to destroyed towns and villages – some of which have been cut off from food, water and power since Tuesday’s torrent – is a priority.

With Spain deploying an extra 10,000 troops, police and civil guards to the Valencia region, the country was carrying out its largest deployment of military and security force personnel in peacetime, Mr Sanchez said.

Officers made around 20 arrests on Saturday evening for thievery and acts of looting, police said, with the authorities pledging to crack down on those taking advantage of the disaster to commit crimes.

Authorities – including  Carlos Mazón, governer of Valencia – have come under fire over the warning systems before the floods, and some stricken residents have complained that the response to the disaster has been too slow.

“I am aware the response is not enough, there are problems and severe shortages… towns buried by mud, desperate people searching for their relatives… we have to improve,” Mr Sanchez said.

In the ground-zero towns of Alfafar and Sedavi, AFP reporters saw no soldiers while residents shovelled mud from their homes and firefighters pumped water from garages and tunnels.

“Thank you to the people who have come to help us, to all of them, because from the authorities: nothing,” a furious Estrella Caceres, 66, told AFP in Sedavi.

‘It feels like the end of the world’

In Chiva, a town west of Valencia which Spanish media reported may be visited by the monarch, Danna Daniella said she had been cleaning her restaurant for three days straight and was still in shock.

“It feels like the end of the world,” the woman in her 30s said.

She said she was haunted by memories of the people trapped by the raging floodwaters “asking for help and there was nothing we could do”.

“It drives you crazy. You look for answers and you don’t find them.”

With telephone and transport networks severely damaged, establishing a precise figure of missing people is difficult.

Mr Sanchez said electricity had been restored to 94 per cent of homes affected by power outages and that around half of the cut telephone lines had been repaired.

Transport Minister Óscar Puente told El Pais daily that certain places would probably remain inaccessible by land for weeks.