[3] Born Domingo López Ortega in Borox, Toledo, he was the son of a farmer, and grew up helping with farm work.

Sensing an opportunity, Ortega jumped into the ring, asked for the bullfighter's tools, gave several passes, and killed the bull.

[4][5] He is quoted as saying that the three canonical maxims of bullfighting, parar, templar y mandar ("to stop, to moderate, to command"), should be supplemented with a fourth: "to load," meaning the bullfighter should put his weight on his forward foot to put him closer to the bull.

"[5] While most modern sources praise Ortega highly,[4] Ernest Hemingway expressed a low opinion of him in Death in the Afternoon, describing him as "skillfully built up... with an elaborate press campaign and ballyhoo," and stating, "He was lousy".

[6] However Laura Riding refuted Hemingway's view strongly in her essay 'The Bull-Fight', calling Ortega "the critical modernist among contemporary bull-fighters" and saying "There are few books that have given me such a sense of learned simplicity as Ortega's work".