In a deeply unsettling case that has captivated and horrified Spain, a court has sentenced two parents to nearly three years in prison for the abuse of their own children, who were kept isolated in their home for several years. The case, which has been dubbed ‘The Oviedo Horror House,’ involves a German man, aged 53, and his partner, a 48-year-old woman with dual German-American nationality. The couple was found guilty of child abuse after keeping their children locked away in their home in Oviedo, Asturias, from December 2021 to April 2025.
The grim details emerged after a concerned neighbor tipped off authorities, leading to a government intervention. The Spanish radio station Onda Cero reported that officials who entered the residence were met with a disturbing scene. The children, two nine-year-old twins and an 11-year-old boy, were discovered wearing multiple masks, a testament to their parents’ extreme self-imposed lockdown, and surrounded by appalling conditions including heaps of trash, feces, and scattered medication.
The court proceedings revealed the disturbing extent of the children’s confinement. Prosecutors from the Asturias Public Prosecutor’s Office detailed how the parents, driven by an irrational fear of disease, kept their children completely isolated from the outside world. This isolation was so severe that the children were deprived of basic educational skills, unable to read or write, and were still in diapers despite their ages.
In March 2026, the trial concluded with the couple being convicted on charges of habitual familial psychological abuse and family abandonment. However, they were acquitted of a separate charge of unlawful detention. The court’s decision also ensured the children were placed under the care of local child protection services, providing them a chance at a new beginning.
The subsequent investigation and trial ended in a guilty verdict in March 2026 on the grounds of habitual familial psychological abuse and family abandonment charges. The pair was acquitted of a third, separate unlawful detention charge. The children have been placed under the custody of local child protection services.
The court heard the Asturias’ Public Prosecutor’s Office case during the trial that the couple kept the three children inside their home, completely isolated from the outside world, out of fear of “hypothetical contagion” to various diseases. Prosecutors said the children were completely denied contact with the outside world, could neither read not write, and wore diapers despite their ages.
Spanish public broadcaster RTVE reported that the parents gave the children an assortment of medications, vitamins, and even psychoactive substances such as cannabis to treat alleged conditions that they had “diagnosed”. Despite the parents’ claims that their children suffered from a “cardiopathy,” German medical reports obtained by the prosecutors and dated 2019 indicated that all three children were healthy.
“The first thing the children did when they went outside was breathe in the fresh air and lie down on the ground to touch the grass,” the Spanish radio station Cope reported in 2025.
Prosecutors initially sought a 25 year prison sentence for the two parents. Unnamed sources from the Asturias Public Prosecutor’s Office disclosed to the Spanish newspaper ABC that, in addition to the prison sentence, both parents were barred from exercising any and all kind of parental authority and custody for three years and four months after their sentence. They will also be prohibited from approaching minors.
Throughout the trial, lawyer Javier Muñoz, who represented the mother, dismissed the media’s notion that the residence is a “horror house” and described the harrowing situation as a “complex” scenario of “voluntary isolation” that, she claimed, stemmed from “a family that has not abandoned its children — quite the opposite — but has devoted itself to its children in a way that may be extravagant or unorthodox, but certainly not criminal.”
