MADRID — Spaniards were facing fuel and food shortages yesterday as the nation’s lorry drivers began an indefinite strike designed to bring the country to its knees.

Tens of thousands of lorry drivers joined protests against soaring fuel prices by disrupting supply routes from France and clogging up traffic around the main cities.

Within hours of the strike beginning, queues formed at petrol pumps.

Almost half the stations in some areas reported that they had run out of supplies by lunchtime.

Long queues were reported at Spanish and Portuguese supermarkets after warnings that supplies of fresh food would be exhausted within days.

The strike could also cause chaos for thousands of British holidaymakers heading to parts of the South of France, Spain, and Portugal.

Huge tailbacks formed at Spanish-French border crossings after protesters attacked vehicles carrying foreign goods whose drivers attempted to defy the strike.

Local television stations showed pictures of a border littered with abandoned lorries sporting broken windscreens, smashed lights, and punctured tires.

In major cities across the Iberian peninsula, lorry drivers formed so-called “snail protests” that brought the ring-roads around Madrid, Barcelona, and Valencia to a standstill. In Portugal, one group of drivers threatened to block the main roads running south to the Algarve tourist region.

“We are the ones who move the goods that this country needs to keep working. If we stop because we haven’t got the money to buy fuel then the country will stop,” the president of Fenadismer, Spain’s haulers’ union, Julio Villascusa, said yesterday.

More than 90,000 drivers have been urged to take part in the strike after the union rejected a package of measures put together by the Ministry of Development to help deal with record fuel prices. They have risen more than 20% during the past year.

The transport strike follows that by fisherman across Spain whose protest against fuel costs entered a second week. Inshore fishermen have now joined the protest.

The stoppages are part of a Europe-wide outcry over the impact of the rise in oil prices, which have reached a record of more than $139 a barrel.

“No one is earning enough money to eat any more: not the truckers, not the fishermen, nobody, and someone has to find a solution,” the president of Spain’s National Road Transport Confederation, Jaime Diaz, said.

The socialist prime minister of Spain, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, has attempted to grapple with the first big strike to hit Spain during its worst economic slowdown in 15 years.

He has offered the lorry drivers emergency credit and early retirement incentives but refuses to set minimum tariffs, saying they have to adapt to fierce competition in Spain and Europe.

The Spanish development ministry said that it hoped to reach a deal with the drivers by midweek.