The couple who died by asphyxiation inside a shack in Montcada i Reixac in a shanty town on the banks of the Besòs river with half a thousand substandard housing units, brings us face to face with a reality of extreme poverty that we live with without seeing it, or without wanting to see it. It is like the homeless who live in the street, who often have the feeling of being transparent to people's eyes. The two latest victims, who are thought to have died from smoke inhalation, join the family (parents and two very young children) who on November 30 lost their lives in a squat in Barcelona's Plaza Tetuan, in the Eixample in Barcelona, due to a fire. These are realities that we have next door. Not even the combination of social services and charities is enough to attend the growing poverty that remains in the margins of everything, in a complicated subsistence. As we know well, the arrival of cold weather is the most critical moment. These are entrenched situations that have become worse: the coronavirus crisis, when we had not yet finished recovering from the previous economic crisis, has put many people on the edge of the abyss. "Social services have never come here, only the police to warn us not to make too big a fire. This is the frontier," said a settlement dweller, from this forgotten slice of no man's land. The mayor of the town herself, Laura Campos, helpless, describes the situation as a favela in constant growth in the middle of the metropolitan area. In the case of Tetuan, in the heart of Barcelona, social services had visited, and the oldest child attended school. But it had not been possible to provide them with decent and legal housing.