Although Robles was born in Fontiveros, Ávila, at the young age of five,[6] he moved with his father, who was a court secretary, to La Fuente de San Esteban, Salamanca, and always thought if himself as Salamancan.

[8] In 1970, Robles made his début with picadores in Lleida, alternating with Paco Núñez and Avelino de la Fuente, and with bulls supplied by the María Lourdes Martín Pérez Tabernero ranch.

[8] Early on in his bullfighting career, on 19 September 1972,[10] Robles sustained a goring in Valladolid, and no sooner had he recovered from that than he got another one in Valencia.

[9] On many other occasions he gave ample evidence of his excellent verónica (bullfighting move in which the cape is drawn over the bull's face) and the depth of his muleta work.

[1] As successful as Robles sometimes was at Las Ventas, he was rather less so at Spain's other great bullfighting centre, the Maestranza in Seville, but even so, at the 1989 Seville Fair, his triumph drew a great clamour from the crowd, and even though the corrida presidency withheld the honour of letting him be borne shoulder-high out through the Prince's Gate, he was awarded two ears for his performance.

[11] On 13 August 1990, Robles's career as a bullfighter came to an abrupt end when he was seriously injured by a bull named Timador, from the Cayetano Muñoz ranch, at the Béziers bullring in the south of France.

Timador twice threw the bullfighter over while the latter was performing a verónica, causing damage to his neck vertebrae that was bad enough to leave Robles tetraplegic.

[1] A year earlier, at the Arles bullring, also in the south of France, Nimeño II had sustained a similar injury, although that was more severe.

Although Robles had not actually broken his neck, the lesions between his fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae nonetheless left him severely disabled for the rest of his life.

At the time when he gave his last interview – only fifteen days before his then unexpected death – he was getting ready for several hunting trips to South Africa.

[6][21] In September 2008, members of the Iniciativa Charra Contra la Desaparición del Tauricidio ("Salamancan Initiative Against [sic] the Disappearance of Tauricide"; another report renders this name a bit less contradictorily Iniciativa Charra Contra el Tauricidio, or "Salamancan Initiative Against Tauricide") claimed responsibility for having profaned the bullfighter's grave, which lies at the cemetery in Ahigal de los Aceiteros, Salamanca,[8] meaning to steal his body (which they found "impossible"), and furthermore carry out several acts of vandalism, which mainly involved painting graffiti critical of bullfighters and bullfighting.