I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once drove halfway to Manchester before realising I'd left the oven on. The journey from Split Airport to our Makarska Brela villa was supposed to take ninety minutes, but thanks to my stubborn refusal to trust technology, we spent forty of those minutes circling a olive grove near Omis, arguing about whether that particular rock formation looked familiar. It did. We'd passed it three times. My partner sat in stony silence while I made increasingly desperate jokes about "getting the scenic route for free."

We arrived in late September, that liminal week when the Central Dalmatian Riviera can't quite decide if it's still summer or pretending to be autumn. The air smelled of pine and something faintly smoky - someone burning vine cuttings further up the hillside, probably. The heat hit us differently than I'd expected. Not the aggressive, face-melting July kind, but a softer, more conspiratorial warmth, like being let in on a secret after the crowds have gone home.

The villa sat perched above Brela's famous coastline, and I'll admit my first thought was thoroughly British: "Blimey, that's a lot of steps." The property cascaded down the hillside in terraces, each level catching the afternoon sun at slightly different angles. Our host, a wiry man named Goran who spoke English with the clipped precision of someone who learned it from BBC World Service, handed us a bowl of figs he'd picked that morning. They were overripe, splitting at the seams, impossibly sweet. "Last of the season," he said, and something about that phrase - the gentle finality of it - made me pause on the threshold, suddenly aware that we were catching the tail end of something.

The pool water was cooler than I'd anticipated. I yelped dramatically on entry, which Goran, still hovering by the gate, found hilarious. "September," he said, shrugging, as if that single word explained everything about thermal dynamics and my own poor planning. He wasn't wrong. The summer season was packing its bags, leaving behind these transitional days where the sea still beckoned but demanded a certain stoicism.

I spent that first evening on the terrace with a bottle of Plavac Mali, watching the light change over the Biokovo mountains. The sunset came earlier than I was used to from peak summer holidays, arriving with a sort of punctual efficiency around half six. The colours felt autumnal - deeper oranges, bruised purples - and the air cooled rapidly enough that I eventually retreated for a cardigan. There's something slightly humbling about being defeated by Croatian evening temperatures when you've spent years boasting about British resilience.

What struck me most, lying there with my slightly-too-chilled wine, was how the season shaped the silence. In high summer, I imagined this place buzzing with the inflatable-mattress pumpings of families, the shouts of children, the competitive splashing of teenagers. Now, the sounds were different: the rhythmic thwack of someone harvesting almonds in a neighbouring garden, the distant putter of a fishing boat returning to Makarska harbour, the first leaves scratching against the terrace tiles. The Riviera was exhaling.

I woke early the next morning, jet-lagged and confused, to find mist sitting in the valleys below. By eight it had burned off, revealing that same impossible blue sea, but the moment stayed with me - this glimpse of what the place became when summer wasn't looking. We had arrived at exactly the right wrong time, or perhaps the wrong right time, and I found myself unexpectedly moved by the generosity of it, this quiet offering of a coast in transition, still beautiful, slightly worn, entirely unbothered by my terrible navigation skills.