Spanish rescuers were Thursday looking for more potential victims in the south-eastern town of Lorca, where a magnitude 5.2 earthquake killed eight people, DPA reported.
Officials revised the death toll down from Wednesday's figure of 10.
The fatalities included a pregnant woman and a young boy. Emergency services attended to nearly 170 injured people. Forty-five of them were reported to be in serious condition, three critical.
Lorca, a town of 100,000 in the Murcia region, looked like a ghost town after thousands of residents left their homes for fear of rockslides.
Dozens of aftershocks were reported overnight, but did not cause significant damage, Spanish National Radio said.
About 10,000 people were evacuated to fair grounds and other premises. Others spent the night in their cars, in cardboard shacks or in tents provided by the authorities.
The government dispatched a military unit comprising 350 soldiers to assist rescuers.
The earthquake had its epicentre near Lorca. It followed an initial quake with a magnitude 4.5 which only damaged the facades of some buildings.
The second quake caused several buildings and a church tower to collapse in Lorca. A large part of the damage was reported in older neighbourhoods, where buildings were less solid. Falling rocks smashed parked cars on streets filled with rubble. Walls and pavements cracked.
An elderly people's home, the city hall and a hospital were evacuated.
The earthquake's seriousness was related to its epicentre being near the earth's surface, earthquake expert Emilio Carreno said.
The quake was the deadliest in Spain since 1956, when 12 people were killed in the Granada region.
Spain experiences about 2,500 earthquakes annually, but the vast majority are so slight they are not even noticed by local residents.
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