In this paper, we generalize the notion of self-adapting one-dimensional index structures to a wide class of spatial index structures. The resulting query responsive index structures can adapt their structure to the users’ query pattern and thus have the potential to improve the response time in practice. We outline two general approaches to providing query responsiveness and present the results in terms of the well-known R ∗ -tree. Our experiments show that depending on the query pattern significant improvements can be obtained in practice.