I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my life, and that includes the time I nearly fell into the fountain at Trafalgar Square after a work Christmas do. The drive from Granada airport had been straightforward enough, or so I thought, until I decided my phone's GPS knew better than the hand-drawn directions left by the cottage owner. Reader, it did not.

Forty-five minutes of increasingly narrow mountain roads later, my wife was giving me that look, the children had begun a competitive whinging contest in the back, and I was quietly wondering if we would ever see tarmac again. The "scenic route" had turned into something approaching an off-road rally stage, complete with goats giving us judgemental stares from dry stone walls. When we finally spotted the white-washed village of Capileira perched on its hillside, I may have let out a small cheer that sounded embarrassingly like my dad.

The cottage sat just below the main village, a proper stone-built affair with terracotta roof tiles and wooden shutters that had clearly seen a few Spanish summers. I reversed towards what I assumed was the parking area, misjudged by roughly a metre, and promptly grounded the hire car on a rock that had been placed there, presumably by someone with a wicked sense of humour. My son, aged seven and already a backseat driving expert, declared this "the best bit of the holiday so far." We extracted ourselves with dignity somewhat intact, though the scrape on the bumper would require creative explaining at the rental desk.

Stepping through the front door, though, that mishap melted away like ice in a tumbler of local rum. The place smelled of wood polish and dried lavender, that particular scent of somewhere properly lived-in rather than clinically holiday-let. The kitchen opened straight onto a covered terrace with views that made me actually stop talking, which those who know me will recognise as a minor miracle. Layer upon layer of mountains fell away towards a distant haze, the kind of view that makes you feel simultaneously tiny and extraordinarily lucky.

The children bolted for the pool, a decent-sized affair surrounded by terracotta pots of geraniums and a lemon tree that dropped the occasional fruit with a comical plop. My daughter spent twenty minutes trying to catch one, convinced she could become some kind of citrus-based goalkeeper. I unpacked with the leisurely pace that holidays demand, discovering that the owners had left us local olive oil, a bottle of wine, and a note warning about the neighbour's cat, who apparently considered the terrace his personal sunbathing territory.

By late afternoon, we had established our positions. My wife had claimed the hammock with a book she would mostly not read due to napping. The children had invented a game called "pool lemon" that I chose not to understand. I stood at the barbecue area, charcoal smoking promisingly, feeling that particular satisfaction of having arrived somewhere that immediately felt like yours. The mountains turned golden, then pink, then that deep blue that comes before proper darkness. Somewhere a dog barked, and church bells rang from Capileira above.

I thought about our wrong turn, the hire car scrape, the goat witnesses to my navigational shame. These things would become the stories, I realised, the bits we would tell friends back home while they nodded politely and checked their phones. The mishaps mattered because they led here, to this terrace, to this particular evening with my family scattered about in comfortable silence, to the smell of grilling peppers and the first stars appearing above the Sierra Nevada.

The neighbour's cat arrived precisely as predicted, claimed a sun lounger that had long since lost its sun, and looked at me with the profound indifference that only cats can manage. I raised my glass to him. He did not care. It was absolutely perfect.