What It Takes to Be a Skilled Bullfighter

The week earlier than the largest bullfight of her profession, in Cádiz, Spain, this previous July, 24-year-old Miriam Cabas posted a rigorously produced video on Instagram. Cabas seems not in a conventional matador costume however in a cream pantsuit, watching a bit of woman—4, perhaps 5—wave a purple muleta at an imaginary bull. “Desires come true,” she wrote within the caption. “The little woman 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 fees on the bullfighters. For the uninitiated, this was a giant deal: Cabas had reached the ultimate stage of her coaching to turn into an expert 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 sequence on younger matadors. He might really feel the gang rooting for her, he advised 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 ladies, although not many, and solely she persevered to turn into an expert.

Successfully banned in sure areas and vilified by some members of Spain’s left-wing coalition authorities, bullfighting has turn into a potent political image for the nation’s resurgent far proper. The populist Vox occasion 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 express about her politics. She appreciates those that have protected bullfighting and does contemplate it an necessary side 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 way in which Cabas makes a dwelling, its leaders are unequivocally anti-feminist.) Cabas doesn’t linger on her function as a barrier breaker, both. “You danger your life earlier than a courageous bulland that’s equally onerous for males or girls,” she advised me.

Nowadays, she balances an intense coaching routine together with her school programs. She’s finding out to turn into a veterinarian. “No one 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.”