We’ve come to Pinto, a quiet Madrid suburb, to meet the Sanchez-Ramirez family. Paco, his wife Vanessa, and grandmother Fabiola: all three are unemployed. The family has no income whatsoever. Just a year-and-a-half ago, Paco Sanchez had his own business in the building sector. He had about 20 workers. He owned a flat. And then the crisis reached him. His customers stopped paying.

"I had to lay everyone off, to close the business," he says. " We came out of that with a lot of debts. We lost the flat which we owned. Here, we are tenants. And they are going to definitely evict us because we haven’t been able to pay the rent for the last two months.”

As a former business owner,  Paco isn’t entitled to unemployment benefits. Nor is his wife, Vanessa Silva-Ramirez. Like many, she hasn’t ever paid social security, although she has worked in hotels and as a cleaner for the past 15 years.

We follow her on her daily route, as she goes door-to-door to drop off her CV and follow up with potential employers. In this café, a poster advertises for staff.

"I left you my CV a week ago. Your worker put it down there, behind the till," Vanessa explains to the boss. But the answer is always the same :  "I haven’t had time to look at the CVs.”

Vanessa has paid several visits to the café. She can’t stand it any longer : "This kind of behaviour completely discourages me. I come back time and time again to see them, because they have still got that small advert at the entrance," she cries.

Later on, Vanessa and her mother Fabiola go to collect the twins - who are 9 years old - from school. Fabiola looked after the children when the couple worked. Now she wants to find a job again as a home help. "Of course I’d like to have a job to be able to help them out financially," she says. "But at the moment it’s very difficult. And up until now I haven’t found anything.”

Back home from the school, Vanessa tells us of the vicious cycle of living on the breadline. She is worried about the children, whose marks at school have fallen: "I can’t afford to let them go out. School trips are over. They don’t go to the birthday parties of their little friends, because I can’t afford to buy any presents.”

In Spain, there are already more than one million households like this one, where every single member is unemployed -- an alarming reality in a country where, until now, much of the burden of looking after the vulnerable in society has fallen to the family.