Journalist, writer and president of Agencia EFE since May 2020, Cañas is the first woman to head the agency. Born in 1957 in Cuenca, she holds a degree in journalism from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and has worked at the Diario de Cádiz, Radiocadena Española and the newspaper Informaciones. She was part of the founding group of the magazine El Globo, belonging to the PRISA Group and joined the newspaper El País in 1981 where, among other positions, she was head of the Madrid and Society sections and deputy director of its school. She taught at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid’s Journalism School and at El País between 1993 and 2000. From 2000 to 2005 Cañas was correspondent in Brussels, and from 2014 to 2017 correspondent in Paris. Between 2006 and 2008, she was director general of International Information at the Spanish Ministry of the Presidency and was a member of the commission for the modernisation of legal language.

In 2011, Cañas published the novel Torres de Fuego. She has reported on the World Conference on Women (1995), the New York Summit (2000) and the Climate
Summit (2015), the enlargement of the European Union and the Common Agricultural Policy, the attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and the Bataclan concert hall in Paris in 2015, among others.