Posted by Alumni from The Atlantic
December 6, 2025
The week before the biggest bullfight of her career, in Cadiz, Spain, this past July, 24-year-old Miriam Cabas posted a carefully produced video on Instagram. Cabas appears not in a traditional matador costume but in a cream pantsuit, watching a little girl'4, maybe 5'wave a red muleta at an imaginary bull. 'Dreams come true,' she wrote in the caption. 'The little girl I used to be still guides me.' Cabas triumphed that day, killing two bulls and receiving three of their ears as trophies. It was the first time she had fought animals antagonized by picadors, men on horseback who stab the bulls with lances, testing their aggression and forcing them to lower their heads on their subsequent charges at the bullfighters. For the uninitiated, this was a big deal: Cabas had reached the final stage of her training to become a professional matador, one of vanishingly few women to compete in the intensely traditional field. The British photographer Owen Harvey was there to document her... learn more