Spanish diachronic linguistics has traditionally overlooked diachronic semantics. Although various studies have explored the semantic development of individual lexical items, Hispanists have hardly dealt with broader patterns of semantic change and the theoretical and methodological problems posed by this phenomenon. Recently, Peter Koch and his team have provided fresh insights into historical Spanish (and Romance) linguistics within the framework of cognitive semantics. This paper discusses such insights into the nature of semantic change critically. It pays special attention to crosslinguistic instances of metaphorical and metonymic changes in semantic categories such as body part designation and spatial and temporal adverbs.