Thousands of people continued to remain out of doors overnight in the south-eastern Spanish town of Lorca following Wednesday's devastating 5.2-magnitude earthquake, DPA reported.
The quake killed nine and injured nearly 300 people. Crown Prince Felipe and his wife as well as Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero were due to attend a funeral mass for the victims on Friday.
About 6,000 people slept in five tented camps that had been set up in the city, emergency services said. Some preferred to sleep in the open for fear of new tremors.
The number of people spending the night outside their homes was down from about 20,000 the previous night. Mayor Francisco Jodar said some families had returned home. Many of those staying in tents were immigrants who had no relatives to lodge them in the area.
Lorca began slowly returning to normal, with some cafeterias opening while soldiers and firefighters continued removing rubble from the streets.
Aid was flowing into the town from all over Spain, with agricultural organizations sending food, while volunteer architects and engineers were evaluating the damage.
The government was due to approve financial and other measures to allow Lorca residents to resume their normal lives as soon as possible.
Zapatero on Thursday pledged a rapid reconstruction of the town of 100,000, where 80 per cent of buildings were estimated to have been damaged.
The earthquake had its epicentre some seven kilometres from Lorca. It followed an earlier, initial quake with a magnitude 4.5 which only damaged the facades of some buildings.
The second, lethal, quake caused several buildings and a church tower to collapse. Falling rocks smashed cars, walls and pavements cracked. The quake was followed by about 30 aftershocks.
The earthquake was the deadliest in Spain since 1956, when 12 people were killed in the Granada region.