The economic crisis has had a major impact on the country, but has been little studied in its socio-territorial dimension. To analyze it in the metropolitan areas of Barcelona and Madrid, we 1) present a time series of the unemployment rates, the evolution of which will be 2) analyzed against the main sociodemographic features of the studied population: age, gender and nationality. 3) These results are further broken down by sector of activity and professional category to account for the occupational characteristics of said population. 4) Next, the obtained time series of unemployment rates are analyzed from a geographical perspective, through the comparison of territorial aggregates such as the cluster of municipalities by size, 2 by comarcas (NUTS4), and by socioeconomic level. Finally, 5) the evolution of said unemployment rates for each period and metropolitan region is studied through multivariate analysis. The obtained results allow for the presentation of a synthesis of the processes that underlie the changes in unemployment rates and their territorial articulation. This analysis shows that the crisis has two distinct phases, with an earlier and more intense incidence in the regional peripheries, in areas most linked to the construction