A drugstore sign shows the temperature of 41 degrees Celsius (105.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in Bordeaux, southwestern France, on Tuesday, as the national weather service, Meteo France, placed 54 departments, about half the country, under a red heat wave alert. (AP Photo/Caroline Blumberg)

PARIS (AP) — France recorded its hottest day ever Tuesday as an early heat wave gripped Europe, prompting the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre museum to restrict visiting hours and disrupting school and transportation schedules in multiple countries.

Punishing temperatures extended to the United Kingdom and Spain, where weather agencies issued red alerts — like France — about the risks of extreme heat for tens of millions of people.

The record of 29.8 C (85.6 F) for France’s national thermal indicator — an average of temperatures measured at 30 weather stations — was only the latest in a series of never-before-registered highs heaped on Europe’s largest country. The conditions were likely to persist at least until the weekend.

“Further record-breaking temperatures are expected, including some that could surpass all previous records, regardless of the time of year,” the Meteo France weather service said.

France’s previous hottest days were recorded during heat waves of August 2003 and July 2019, with an average temperature of 29.4 C (84.9 F).

Temperature records also tumbled at individual weather stations and on consecutive days in some towns as daytime highs climbed well above 40 C (104 F), Meteo France said.

In the French capital, Gin Dujardin said the heat forced him to halt his work fixing roofs, which in Paris often have galvanized zinc coverings.

“It’s very, very hard because the zinc is very hot. The welds don’t hold,” he said. “It’s Dubai temperatures. It’s impossible.”

France has recorded 40 fatalities from drowning in the past week as people seek relief in rivers and other bodies of water, despite authorities’ warnings about unsupervised swimming. Most of the drownings involved young people, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said.

Meteo France said the heat wave has reached what it described as a “plateau of severity,” with unrelenting heat, day and night.

Human-caused climate change is tied to increasingly extreme weather, and U.N. climate agency projections say the next five years are likely to shatter more heat records.

In a country without widespread air conditioning, schools, public transportation and sporting events have been affected. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower closed in the afternoon instead of late at night, as it usually does. The Louvre museum said it would close two hours earlier than normal from Wednesday through Saturday.

This heat wave, coming early in the summer, has already been compared to the August 2003 heat wave that roasted France with the highest temperatures in over half a century. It caused an estimated 15,000 deaths, many of them among older people in apartments and retirement homes without air conditioning.