A 10-year-old boy was killed by a falling tree as he played football in northern Portugal, the country's civil protection service said on its website.

It appealed to people in the country's northern and central coastal regions to stay home as winds gusted up to 140 kilometres (87 miles) an hour.

A man was also killed by a falling tree in the French town of Luchon, in the southern Pyrenees region, police said.

In Spain, an 82-year-old woman was killed when a wall collapsed on her in the town of Vilar de Barrio in the northwestern region of Galicia, regional authorities said.

The powerful winds and heavy rains hit Spain's Canary Islands archipelago late on Friday, with gusts of up to 128 kilometres an hour reported, forcing the cancellation of about 20 flights, leaving some 10,000 homes without power but causing no major damage or casualties.

The storm swept northeast into Galicia late on Saturday afternoon, where wind gusts reached 147 kph and some 27,000 households were without electricity, regional authorities said.

Rail services were cancelled in Galicia as well as in the northern regions of Asturias, Cantabria, the Basque Country and parts of Castilla y Leon, where the storm left some 63,000 households without power.

Spanish meteorological agency Aemet placed all five regions under the alert level "red", the highest on its four-level scale.

In the Basque Country, where power was cut to some 30,000 homes, a construction crane crashed onto a three-storey house in the town of Abaltzisketa, causing major damage but no casualties, regional authorities said.

Aemet said the storm would be short but very violent and capable of causing serious damage.

"This is a very deep, very intense and very fast-moving storm," Spanish Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said, warning people to avoid using their cars and taking mountain or sea walks.

The storm developed in the Atlantic off the Portuguese island of Madeira, still reeling from the flash floods sparked by heavy rains that wrecked the centre of the capital Funchal and killed 42 people a week ago.

The cost of the damage for the tourist island off northwest Africa is more than one billion euros (1.35 billion dollars), according to the head of the local government, Alberto Joao Jardim.

Despite the violent winds, "the night was calm and normal", the Madeira fire service said, and traffic at the main airport on Saturday morning was unaffected.

The Portuguese mainland was placed on "orange" alert by the civil protection authority for all of Saturday.

The country's fire service was called to intervene on more than 4,200 occasions due to incidents related to the storm, mostly to remove fallen trees, which blocked roads and rail lines.

The storm was moving into France late on Saturday, where five of the country's 95 departments were placed on red alert and 69 others on orange alert for 24 hours from 2000 GMT.

Winds were expected to reach up to 150 kph an hour, according to Meteo France -- but not the record 200-kph levels of a deadly 1999 hurricane that battered the country.

Municipal authorities in Paris ordered all parks and cemeteries closed on Sunday, when Meteo France predicted winds of up to 120 kph for the region around the French capital.

Meteo France said the storm would move rapidly, starting in the south and hitting many regions before it made its way towards Denmark by Sunday evening.

Two men fishing on foot also drowned off the western French coastal town of Piriac-sur-Mer Saturday, emergency services said, because of an unusually high tide not connected to the storm.

burs-wdb/cjo

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