BARCELONA, Spain — The recurrent storms in eastern Spain that led to massive flooding last week and killed at least 217 people, mostly near Valencia, dumped rain on Barcelona on Monday, prompting authorities to suspend commuter rail service.

Spanish Transport Minister Óscar Puente said he was suspending all commuter trains in northeast Catalonia, a region with 8 million people, on request from civil protection officials.

Mobile phones in Barcelona screeched with an alert for “extreme and continued rainfall” on the city’s southern outskirts. The alert said to avoid any normally dry gorges or canals.

Puente said that the rains had forced air traffic controllers to change the course of 15 flights at Barcelona’s airport, located on the southern flank of the city.

Several highways have been closed due to flooding.

Classes were canceled in Tarragona, a city in southern Catalonia about halfway between Barcelona and Valencia, after a red alert for rains was issued.

Meanwhile, in Valencia, the search continued for bodies inside houses and thousands of wrecked cars strewn in the streets, on highways, and in canals that channeled last week’s floods into populated areas.

Spain’s Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska said authorities can still not give a reliable estimate of the missing. Spanish national television RTVE, however, has broadcast pleas for help by several desperate people whose loved ones are unaccounted for.

In the Aldaia municipality, some 50 soldiers, police and firefighters, some wearing wetsuits, searched in a huge shopping center’s underground parking lot for possible victims. They used a small boat and spotlights to move around in the huge structure with vehicles submerged in about 3 feet of murky water.

Police spokesman Ricardo Gutiérrez told reporters that so far some 50 vehicles had been found and no bodies had been discovered there.

The Bonaire shopping mall’s 1,800 underground parking spaces quickly filled with water and mud last Tuesday and Wednesday when the southern outskirts of Valencia were hit by a tsunami-like flooding.