Like many other languages, Spanish expresses habituality in two ways: by means of bare imperfective forms and by use of a dedicated construction, consisting of a periphrastic verb involving the verbal predicate soler and its infinitive complement. The intricacies of distribution and semantic contribution of soler remain largely unexplored, as does the relation it bears to the more general unmarked imperfective mode. This paper presents a description of the main syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of habitual constructions with soler in Spanish, and sketches a corresponding formal analysis that aims at capturing its main semantic properties.