A Spanish court has sentenced two parents to prison for keeping their children locked away at their home for years in a case now known in the country as ‘The Oviedo Horror House’.
A couple, identified due to Spanish child protection standards only as a 53 year-old German man and a 48 year-old German-American dual national woman, have been sentenced to two years and ten months in prison each for child abuse. The case, which is said to have shocked the nation and residents of the northwest city of Oviedo, Asturias, saw three children — two nine year-old twins and an 11 year-old boy — locked away by their parents between December 2021 and April 2025.
It has earlier been reported that the children were locked away by their parents under a self-imposed Coronavirus lockdown regime that only ended when the Spanish government arrived at the property following a tip-off by a suspicious neighbour.
The Spanish radio station Onda Cero recounted that, at the time, officials entered the residence and found the children wearing “up to three masks” each and the house itself in very poor condition. The court heard how the children were discovered surrounded by piles of trash, faeces, and medication.
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.”
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