But the number of job seekers remained well over four million people, declining 1.87 percent from the previous month to 4.19 million, the Labour Ministry figures showed.

The figure was up 3.04 percent from a year earlier, however.

Unemployment had peaked in March at 4.33 million people — the highest number since these figures were first collated in their current format in 1996, it said.

The Spanish unemployment rate hit 21.29 percent in the first quarter of 2011, the highest in the industrialized world, according to separate figures released earlier by the National Statistics Institute.