I should have known the holiday was going to be characterful when I got spectacularly lost trying to find the place. There I was, crawling along a mountain road near Algatocin, convinced my sat nav had developed a personal vendetta against me, when I realised I had been driving in circles past the same goat for twenty minutes. The goat, I am certain, was judging me. I wound down the window to ask directions, which is how I met Pepe.

Pepe was eighty if he was a day, wearing a flat cap that had seen better decades, and leaning against a wall with the practiced patience of a man who had watched many a tourist lose their sanity on these roads. He spoke no English. I speak Spanish like a toddler with a head injury. Between us, with much pointing and a truly embarrassing mime of a goat, we established that I needed to reverse back down the hill, take the left fork that looked like a driveway to nowhere, and ignore the sign that said "no entry" because, as Pepe explained with a wink, "nobody uses that road anyway." He then produced an orange from his pocket, handed it to me as if bestowing a sacred relic, and wandered off without another word. I ate that orange on the terrace later. It was the best orange I have ever tasted, and I have spent the subsequent months wondering if Pepe was some kind of citrus wizard.

The villa itself was a proper Andalusian affair, all whitewashed walls and terracotta tiles, with a pool that seemed to hang off the mountainside like it was showing off. But the real discovery was Maria, who appeared the next morning with bread and the kind of directness that makes you immediately rearrange your personality. She was the local contact for the property, a woman in her sixties with steel-grey hair pulled back severely and an apron that suggested she had already done more useful work today than I would manage in a fortnight. She inspected the villa with the critical eye of a headmistress, adjusted a curtain I had not realised was crooked, and informed me that the coffee maker was "temperamental" with the same tone one might use to describe a violent criminal.

"You must talk to it," she said, dead serious. "Not shout. Talk. It is sensitive."

I spent the rest of the week having one-sided conversations with a kitchen appliance, and honestly? The coffee improved. Maria returned twice more, each time with some small gift - tomatoes from her garden, a jar of honey with no label - and each time with some fresh intelligence about the village. She told me about the baker who opened whenever he felt like it, the bar where the men played dominoes with the intensity of a chess championship, and the Englishwoman who had moved here fifteen years ago and still could not make proper gazpacho to local satisfaction. "We are polite to her," Maria said, with the particular emphasis that made it clear they were nothing of the sort.

On my third evening, I walked down to the village proper and found myself in a tiny bar with three tables and a television showing a football match nobody was watching. The barman was called Antonio, though everyone called him Tono, and he had the remarkable gift of making you feel like a regular within approximately ninety seconds. He poured me a manzanilla without asking, correctly deducing that I was the sort of person who would pretend to like sherry to seem sophisticated, and introduced me to the room with a flourish that suggested I was far more interesting than I knew myself to be.

"This one," he announced, "talks to coffee machines."

A man at the corner table, who had the weathered look of someone who had spent his entire life outdoors and regretted none of it, raised his glass to me. "Smart," he said. "My wife, I talk to her forty years, still she does not work properly."

The whole bar laughed, including Tono, including the lone woman at the counter who had been reading a newspaper and pretending not to listen, including me. I ended up staying for three hours, eating olives that tasted of the sun and bread that tasted of something I could not name but immediately wanted more of, and learning that the man with the wife joke was called Curro, that he had never left Andalusia in his life and saw no reason to, and that he thought the English were "not bad, for people who do not understand ham."

By the time I left Algatocin, I had been given a recipe for tortilla that Maria insisted was the only proper one, had been invited to a dominoes game I was too frightened of losing to accept, and had received another orange from Pepe, who appeared at the villa on my final morning as if he had been waiting for exactly this moment. He did not explain how he knew I was leaving. I did not ask. Some things in that village, I had learned, simply happened because they were supposed to.

I drove away more carefully than I had arrived, taking the left fork that looked like nowhere, ignoring the no entry sign with the confidence of someone who had been initiated into local secrets. The goat was not there to see me off. I choose to believe it had simply moved on to judge someone else.