Born in 1935 in Guayaquil, Julio lost his father when he was six years old and was very ill as a child: he suffered bronchopneumonia, diphtheria and dysentery. He was nursed by his mother and, against her will, began to sing publically from a young age with his older brother Pepe.
After completing elementary school, he worked in a women’s shoe store, but his beautiful, warm voice was already earning him a reputation on the airwaves, as he began participating in programs of Radio Condor. In 1950 he began touring the villages of Esmeraldas and Manabí, singing in trio with two friends.
Though often returning to the shoe store to survive and despite the pleas of his mother, Julio wasn't able to quit the Bohemian life, which finally rewarded him with his first hit in 1956, Fatalidad , something between a Peruvian waltz and an Ecuadorian "pasillo.", which marked his breakthrough. It was a huge success from the very beginning — selling 6000 copies within a week. By the end of 1956 Julio had produced a dozen albums under the Onyx label and began touring Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.
The Ecuadorian’s parrandero life came to an abrupt end when he was arrested upon return to Ecuador and forced into military service. In 1960, Julio returned to civilian life and sell out gigs and soon began making films including Mala mujer or "Wicked Woman" and ‘Romance in Ecuador’. 1965 he settled in Venezuela, from where made triumphal tours of Mexico, Puerto Rico and Central America and eventiually United States and Canada.
His private life was beset with scandals which often appeared in the news; he was married five times, and it is said had 28 children with various women. But this didn’t effect his popularity across the Spanish-speaking world, where he was loved for his boleros and pasillos about heartbreak and eternal devotion, and his represented the working man he never stopped being "the kid from the block", humble, friendly, bohemian, generous, and joyful., he/she was generous, wasteful money
On his return to the Ecuador in 1975, tired, prematurely aged and worm-eaten by cirrhosis, Julio was heckled because his voice was no longer that of before. But on his untimely death at the age of forty-three, 250,000 people came out to moarn him in Guayaquil. After his death, an Argentine businessman an LP of unpublished songs that Julio recorded secretly when he was broke which was an international best seller, leading many to say that "the Nightingale sang better after his death."
