This chapter provides an overview of the geographic varieties of Spanish spoken all over the world and how as well as to what extent they differ, with some socio-historical insights. Firstly, the process of standardisation of Castilian Spanish and the subsequent supralocalisation of non-standard varieties is explored, also in the world-wide context with the transplantation of Spanish dialectal varieties beyond the Iberian Peninsula since the 15th century. The geographical dispersion of the Spanish language in its array of geolinguistic and sociolinguist manifestations meant the growth of linguistic diversity within the Spanish-speaking world and the proliferation of regional varieties, with pronunciation, grammatical and/or lexical-semantic variation. In turn, the processes of standardisation, prescriptivism and supralocalisation gave way to prestige and ideology patterns, the development of attitudes towards the different varieties of Spanish and their respective identity values, where the Pan-Hispanic linguistic norm became crucial for the defense of language rights later in the second half of the 20th century. Secondly, the brief description of contemporary linguistic changes and patterns of sociolinguistic variation provides us with a characterisation of the rich mosaic of varieties of Spanish around the word: European, Latin-American, African and Asian Spanish Varieties.