This paper focuses on the task of bilingual clustering, which involves dividing a set of documents from two different languages into a set of groups, so that documents with similar topics belong to the same group, regardless of their source language. It mainly considers a clustering approach that relies on the use of cognates as document features. Particularly, it proposes two straightforward methods that extract cognates from their own target document collection and do not require using any external bilingual resource, like parallel corpora or a bilingual dictionary. Experimental results in two bilingual collections that include news reports in English and Spanish are encouraging. They indicate that cognates are relevant features for the task of bilingual clustering, outperforming by more than 10% the results achieved by other known approaches.