Spain is abandoning people in poverty and failing to take social rights seriously despite its post-recession recovery, according to a UN expert who has finished a 12-day fact-finding visit to the country.

Philip Alston, the UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, said that while Spain had largely bounced back from the economic crisis of 2008, poverty rates remained “appallingly high” and urgent action was required.

“Spain is a country with a grand history, a global leader in some areas, and a cultural beacon,” he said in a preliminary report published on Friday.

“But Spain today needs to take a close look at itself in the mirror. What it will see is not what most Spaniards would wish for. The self-image of a close family-based society rooted in deeply shared values and social solidarity has been badly fractured by an economic crisis and the implementation of neoliberal policies. The local and familial safety nets that had been historically important continue to work for the well-off, but have been undermined for a large part of the population.”

He noted that 26.1% of people – and 29.5% of children – were at risk of poverty or social exclusion in Spain in 2018. The unemployment rate, which stands at 13.85%, is more than double the EU average, while youth unemployment is at 30.5%.

Alston, who visited Madrid, Galicia, the Basque country, Extremadura, Andalucía and Catalonia, said he had seen areas that “many Spaniards would not recognise as parts of their own country”: a shantytown with “far worse conditions than a refugees camp”; poor neighbourhoods “where families raise children with a dearth of state services, health clinics, employment centres, security, paved roads or legal electricity”, and a segregated school where all the students are Roma and which has a 75% rate of early leaving.

The special rapporteur said the word he had heard most frequently during the trip was “abandoned”, adding that the benefits of the economic recovery had mainly gone to corporations and the wealthy, while the public services and protections slashed during the economic crisis had in many cases not been restored.

Part of the problem, he said, was that the social assistance network was “fragmented and impossible to navigate”, and too many officials were complacent or keen to pin the blame on other parts of the system.

Alston called for more to be done to help vulnerable groups such as Spain’s Roma population of 750,000 people and its 6 million migrants. He mentioned visiting a migrant settlement in Andalucía whose conditions “rival the worst I have seen anywhere in the world” and whose residents have almost no access to government support.

He said that low-cost social housing was “almost nonexistent” and detailed the challenges facing those in rural poverty, those with disabilities and the hundreds of thousands of people who work as live-in maids or carers.

Alston paid tribute to the “incredible work” done by the third sector in Spain and noted that the new coalition government – between the Spanish Socialist Workers’ party and the far-left, anti-austerity Unidas Podemos alliance – had “high hopes and impressive ambitions, especially in the social sphere”.

But he said it faced “daunting challenges” and that Spain needed “innovative leadership” from the central government and properly funded reforms at a regional level.

Alston said the new government needed to focus on the housing crisis, decent working conditions for those in low-paid jobs, a national minimum incomes scheme, early childhood education programme for all children aged up to three, and far-reaching fiscal reforms to improve redistribution, tackle fraud and bring transparency to corporate tax arrangements.

“If strategic plans, action programmes, and voluminous but unreadable reports could solve poverty, Spain would be riding high,” he said.

“But in the absence of a meaningful commitment to uphold people’s social rights to housing, education, and an adequate standard of living, these grand designs will continue to be as ineffectual as they have been over the past decade.”

He added: “Poverty is ultimately a political choice, and governments can, if they wish, opt to overcome it.”