I have never been more grateful for air conditioning than the afternoon we finally rolled up to Vodnjan Golubovo, three hours after our satnav decided that a gravel track through an olive grove constituted a "main road." The hire car's suspension groaned in a way that suggested therapy, and my partner sat beside me clutching a lukewarm bottle of water to her forehead like a Victorian heroine with the vapours. We had chosen July. July, in hindsight, had chosen us.

The journey from Pula airport had started with such optimism. Blue skies, the Adriatic glinting through the pines, that particular Croatian light that makes everything look slightly overexposed. We stopped at a roadside stall near Fazana for peaches and a coffee, and I felt genuinely smug about our life choices. Then the satnav happened. The track grew narrower, the olive branches scratched the paintwork, and somewhere around the third wrong turning I spotted a tortoise ambling past with an expression that clearly said, "Tourists. Every summer."

By the time we found the actual turning for the property, the peaches had achieved the consistency of warm soup and my shirt had developed an unfortunate relationship with the seat. But then we saw it. The stone house sat low and solid against the hillside, surrounded by those Istrian gardens that manage to look both cultivated and completely wild. The afternoon heat had driven everything into stillness. Even the cicadas sounded exhausted.

Our host emerged from the shade of a pergola, moving with the unhurried pace of someone who has long since accepted that July moves at one speed only. She handed us chilled glasses of something herbal and fizzy that I later learned was elderflower cordial mixed with sparkling water. I drank mine in approximately four seconds and tried not to look desperate for a second. The stone walls of the house, she explained, had been keeping interiors cool since long before air conditioning existed. I touched the exterior and found it almost cold, which felt like actual witchcraft after the car's mobile sauna.

The pool was the colour of melted jade and completely irresistible. We abandoned our bags in the hallway with the reckless abandon of people who have forgotten what sensible body temperatures feel like. The water was not cold, exactly, but it carried that particular quality of heat-drained stone pools, where the temperature seems to come from somewhere deep and ancient rather than from the sun directly. I floated on my back and watched swallows darting through the hazy sky, their flight paths as erratic as my own navigation had been.

That first evening, we discovered the seasonal rhythm that would shape our entire stay. The heat broke around six, not dramatically but gradually, like someone slowly opening a door. We walked down to Vodnjan village as the stone buildings released their stored warmth, the narrow streets becoming almost pleasant after the oppression of full afternoon sun. The local konoba had set its tables outside, and we ate prsut that tasted of the same bora wind that supposedly cures it, drinking Malvazija that had been kept at precisely the right temperature in the restaurant's cellar.

I remember watching an old man in the square sweeping the same patch of pavement he had probably swept for fifty summers, moving with the same unhurried pace as our host. The season here does not merely influence daily life; it dictates it entirely. You do not fight July in Istria. You wait for it to relent, which it always does, eventually, and you plan your existence around its moods with the pragmatism of people who understand that nature here operates on timescales far longer than a fortnight's holiday.

We fell asleep that first night with the shutters open to catch any wandering breeze, the distant sound of someone playing accordion music drifting up from the village below, and I thought that perhaps getting lost in an olive grove had been exactly the right introduction after all.