I have been trying to remember why I used the location field in the first place, so I went back to the docs. (http://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/search/4.5/reference/en-US/html_single/#spatial) If you look at section "9.2. Performing Spatial Queries", the examples use a location field, but I think it would be good if the Spatial.COORDINATES_DEFAULT_FIELD constant was mentioned as well. Do you want another JIRA for that?