This special issue of the Journal of Global Optimization consists of papers presented at the XIII Global Optimization Workshop (GOW'16), which took place on September 4th-8th, 2016, at the University of Minho, in Braga, Portugal. This workshop attracted 54 participants from 14 countries and the scientific program contained one invited talk by Professor Panos Pardalos and 47 contributed talks. These global optimization workshops have been held since 1985 and more recently every two years. This special issue mainly focuses on deterministic methods and heuristics for global optimization. Problems with continuous as well as with integer variables are discussed. Some stochastic algorithms are also investigated. The papers were reviewed in the usual process and eleven papers were accepted for publication in this special issue. Below we give a brief presentation of the included papers.