I am creating a Maven Spring project, which includes MVC, Data and Security.
My Spring applicationContext-*.xml files are located at \\src\\main\\resources\\spring\\
I faced the same error and realized that pom.xml had java 1.7 and STS compiler pointed to Java 1.8. Upon changing compiler to 1.7 and rebuild fixed the issue.
PS: This answer is not related to actual question posted but applies to similar error for app Context not loading