In this talk I will briefly present spiral solutions in different fields of knowledge, giving examples of water whirlpools, tornadoes, spiral galaxies, smoker vortex rings... The role of the dimension, geometry, and topology, and the consequences of the dissipation of energy will be discussed. In connection with optics, I will report on the existence and stability of self- localized vortices in a model for an experimentally available laser system. I will show how self-localized vortices with different azimuthal numbers can be excited and discuss their bifurcation diagrams. Different nonlinear dynamical regimes are observed as a result of the instabilities.