A place where one feels safe, at home, and from which one draws strength.
A place where one feels safe, at home, and from which one draws strength — from bullfighting, the area of the ring the bull retreats to and makes its stand.
Unlike contentment or peace (feeling-states), querencia is a place — or one's bond to it — that generates strength and rootedness, adding “home-ness” and a source of confidence that plain security lacks. Closely akin to German Geborgenheit, but located rather than purely relational. (Note the irony in its bullfighting origin: the bull is strongest, yet most doomed, in its querencia.)
From querer “to want, like, love”; a noun for an animal's favorite haunt or place of safety.
Spanish, “fondness; an animal's favorite haunt,” from querer “to want, love,” from Latin quaerere “to seek,” + -encia.
Attested in Spanish from the late 12th century (“liking”), with the bullfighting/animal sense by 1639. It entered English in the 1930s — the OED's earliest evidence is 1932, in Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon. The broad “sanctuary one draws strength from” sense is a later, popularized extension.
Romanticization risk: the inspirational “soul-home” sense common in English lifestyle writing is a loosened extension of the concrete bullfighting term (the bull's defensive ground) and the plain Spanish sense (an animal's habitual haunt).