I have never been so grateful for air conditioning in my entire life, and I once spent a summer working in a kitchen with a broken extractor fan. The drive from Pula airport to our villa in Galizana had been mercifully short, but stepping out of the hire car at half past two in the afternoon felt like opening an oven door and climbing inside.

The mishap came within thirty seconds. In my eagerness to escape the heat, I grabbed what I thought was our villa key from the envelope the letting agent had left at the airport. It was not our key. It was, in fact, the key to the outdoor storage shed, which I discovered only after marching confidently to the neighbouring property and standing there like a confused burglar while an elderly German gentleman watered his tomatoes and watched me with understandable suspicion. My partner found the actual key in the glove compartment, where I had apparently tossed it while hunting for sunglasses. We did not speak for several minutes. The tomatoes, I suspect, are still being discussed over schnitzel.

July in Istria is not subtle. The sun sits high and heavy, and the olive trees shimmer with that particular silver-green haze that makes everything look slightly unreal, like a film set where someone has cranked the saturation too high. Our villa, when we finally entered the correct one, was a low stone building with terracotta tiles and shutters that had clearly been designed by someone who understood that midday in Croatia is a time for siesta, not sightseeing. I flung myself onto the nearest sofa and lay there, a damp English mess, while my partner investigated the pool.

The pool saved us. That first afternoon, we did nothing but move between its turquoise water and the shaded terrace, where a grapevine had been trained across a pergola with the precision of someone who had spent decades perfecting exactly the right amount of dappled light. Even the insects seemed to respect the heat hierarchy; the wasps hovered politely near the fig tree but never invaded our space, as if they too understood that August behaviour would be different, more desperate, but July still allowed for manners.

The garden smelled of lavender and warm stone. Everything was dry, crackling, expectant. Our neighbour later explained that the maize in the surrounding fields was weeks from harvest, and you could see the tension in the landscape, everything holding its breath for rain that would not come until September. The cicadas provided the soundtrack, a constant mechanical whir that became so familiar I only noticed it when it stopped, briefly, at dusk.

That first evening, we walked to the village shop as the light began to soften. Galizana itself was quiet, almost sleepy, the kind of place where locals know to do their business before noon or after five. We bought peaches that were so ripe they bruised at a stern glance, and a bottle of local Malvazija that the shopkeeper insisted we chill properly. "Not like the English," he said, with a smile that suggested he had met my kind before.

Back at the villa, we ate on the terrace as the sky turned that particular Mediterranean pink, the heat finally releasing its grip enough to make movement feel possible again. I thought about how different this would be in spring, when the fields would be green and the wild asparagus pushing through, or in autumn when the olive harvest brought bustle and the truffle hunters appeared with their dogs. But July had its own rhythm, its own demands. You did not fight it. You surrendered, you moved slowly, you let the season teach you its tempo.

By nine o'clock, I was asleep on the outdoor sofa, a half-finished glass of wine warming beside me, the cicadas still churning their endless summer song.