A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
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querencia
Querencia is the place a creature returns to and defends, the ground where it is most itself. In bullfighting, it is the specific patch of the ring a bull adopts partway through the fight, standing in it, refusing to leave, and fighting far harder there than anywhere else. In wider Spanish use, it means the place you are drawn back to and where you feel most at home, whether or not you were born in it.
Etymology
The word is Spanish, built on the verb meaning to want or to love, so it is, roughly, the place of wanting. Behind that verb is a Latin verb meaning to seek or to ask, which is also the source of English query, quest, require, inquest, and conquer. The place you love and the question you ask come from the same root; both are a form of seeking.
Notes
Hemingway explained the bullfighting sense at length in Death in the Afternoon and it entered English through him. It reached nature writing separately and has become one of the standard words in it, used for the specific piece of country a person is bound to. The useful part of the definition is that a querencia is not chosen in advance; a bull finds his during the fight, and nobody watching can predict where it will be.