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The week earlier than the largest bullfight of her profession, in Cádiz, Spain, this previous July, 24-year-old Miriam Cabas posted a fastidiously produced video on Instagram. Cabas seems not in a conventional matador costume however in a cream pantsuit, watching a little bit lady—4, possibly 5—wave a crimson muleta at an imaginary bull. “Goals come true,” she wrote within the caption. “The little lady I was nonetheless guides me.”

Cabas triumphed that day, killing two bulls and receiving three of their ears as trophies. It was the primary time she had fought animals antagonized by picadors, males on horseback who stab the bulls with lances, testing their aggression and forcing them to decrease their heads on their subsequent costs on the bullfighters. For the uninitiated, this was a giant deal: Cabas had reached the ultimate stage of her coaching to turn out to be knowledgeable matador, one in all vanishingly few girls to compete within the intensely conventional discipline.

The British photographer Owen Harvey was there to doc her victory. Harvey has adopted Cabas’s profession for greater than a yr as a part of a collection on younger matadors. He might really feel the gang rooting for her, he informed me. Cabas is a neighborhood expertise, born in Los Barrios, a small city on Spain’s southern tip the place bullfighting continues to be very a lot alive. She was launched to the exercise by her grandfather, who signed her up for after-school classes when she was simply 5. There have been different women, although not many, and solely she persevered to turn out to be knowledgeable.

Successfully banned in sure areas and vilified by some members of Spain’s left-wing coalition authorities, bullfighting has turn out to be a potent political image for the nation’s resurgent far proper. The populist Vox celebration has made some extent of celebrating it as a necessary Spanish custom—and of trolling these involved about animal cruelty. Cabas, for her half, prefers to not be specific about her politics. She appreciates those that have protected bullfighting and does contemplate it an essential facet of Spanish identification, however, in contrast to a few of her friends, she doesn’t put up pictures with far-right politicians. (Although Vox helps the best way Cabas makes a residing, its leaders are unequivocally anti-feminist.) Cabas doesn’t linger on her function as a barrier breaker, both. “You threat your life earlier than a toro bravo, and that’s equally onerous for males or girls,” she informed me.

Lately, she balances an intense coaching routine along with her faculty programs. She’s finding out to turn out to be a veterinarian. “No person loves bulls like us,” she mentioned. “We dedicate our lives to them—if that’s not love, then what’s?”

This text seems within the January 2026 print version with the headline “By the Horns.”