Chaos and confusion Thousands left stranded by blackouts

The ski lift, carrying 16 people, dangled kilometers above the southern Spanish region of Andalusia. As parts of Spain and Portugal were plunged into a blackout on Monday, the lift had come to a halt, leaving people trapped in swaying gondolas.

- Ashifa Kassam

Some four hours later, video posted online by the ski station showed a rescuer lowering themselves into a gondola to set up a system of ropes that allowed the skiers to rappel to the ground.

The scene from Granada's Sierra Nevada was among many harrowing tales that have emerged after an hours-long blackout that grounded flights, paralyzed trains and metros and cut off mobile communications across the Iberian Peninsula.

In the small Basque city of Eibar, 11 people were trapped in a public lift for more than three hours.

"It's unbelievable that this could happen," Mempho Mujanovic told newspaper El Diario Vasco. "Nobody can understand how, in the 21st century, we ended up spending so much time in a lift."

The lift came to a halt as it was making the 40-meter descent from a school to the street below. As the temperature began to rise inside the cramped lift, some of the six trapped children - all of whom were 4-year-olds from the same class - began banging on the glass doors, anxious to be let out.