I have never been particularly good with directions, which is how I ended up driving our hire car down what I can only describe as a goat track somewhere west of Chiclana de la Frontera, convinced I was taking a shortcut to our holiday let. My partner, who had been dozing, woke up when the wheels hit a patch of loose gravel and made that particular noise that means you have definitely made a wrong turning somewhere. The sat nav had given up on us three roundabouts back. My phone had no signal. And there we were, surrounded by nothing but sun-bleached fields and the occasional olive tree giving us a very judgemental look.

This was not how I had imagined our arrival. In my head, we would glide up to the villa, perhaps with some tasteful Spanish guitar playing in the background. Instead, we reversed fifty metres, turned around with the grace of a supermarket trolley, and eventually found the proper road by following a farmer on a moped who clearly thought we were mad but waved cheerfully enough.

When we finally reached the place, I was ready for a sit down and possibly a small cry. But stepping out of the car, something shifted. The villa sat there, all whitewashed walls and terracotta roof tiles, with a garden that smelled of jasmine and something else I could not name. The pool glinted in that particular Andalusian light that makes everything look slightly golden, even the dust on the hire car. Our neighbour, an elderly man watering his geraniums, observed us with the patient expression of someone who has watched many lost tourists arrive over the years. "Buenas tardes," he said, which I took as generous given the state of us.

That first evening, we walked into Chiclana proper with no particular plan, which is always when the best things happen. We took a wrong turn off the main square, following the sound of what I thought was music but turned out to be a television through an open window. The street narrowed, then narrowed again, until we were in what felt like someone's back passage, all crumbling plaster and potted plants fighting for space on windowsills. And then, quite suddenly, we emerged into a tiny plaza with a single bar, three tables outside, and an old woman selling churros from a fryer on a folding table.

We ordered beers we did not really need and sat there watching local lads play a half-hearted game of football against a church wall. The churros were still warm, sugar everywhere, absolutely no elegance to our eating whatsoever. My partner had sugar on her nose for ten minutes before I told her. This is the kind of thing that happens when you stop trying to find the right place and simply let yourself be somewhere.

The next morning, determined to get properly lost this time, we set off on foot with water bottles and absolutely no map. The salt marshes south of town pull you in without meaning to. One minute you are on a proper path, the next you are following a heron through reeds that come up to your waist, wondering if this counts as an adventure or just poor planning. We found a shack of a beach bar, the sort that looks like it might blow over in a strong wind, where a man served us fried anchovies and told us about the flamingos that come through in spring. His English was roughly equal to my Spanish, which is to say we understood about forty percent of each other and enjoyed the conversation enormously.

By day three, getting lost had become our entire strategy. We drove down lanes that narrowed to nothing, found ourselves at farm gates with suspicious dogs, doubled back, tried again. Each dead end seemed to reveal something worth the trouble. A vineyard with a honesty box selling rough local wine. A cemetery with marble tombs so elaborate they looked like small houses, someone playing guitar somewhere behind the walls. A bakery in what I am fairly certain was someone's actual front room, where an ancient machine stamped out biscuits and the woman running it insisted we try everything.

I am not someone who normally enjoys uncertainty. I like a plan, a backup plan, and preferably a spreadsheet. But there was something about that particular stretch of Andalusia, the way the light falls flat and bright in the afternoons, the way every village seems to have its own rhythm completely indifferent to visitors, that wore down my need to know where I was going. The mishap of that first arrival stopped feeling like a mishap and started feeling like the point.

On our last evening, we found ourselves on a beach I still could not name if you paid me, somewhere between Chiclana and the coast, accessed by a sandy track we took on impulse. A few local families were packing up, children wrapped in towels, the remains of picnics in plastic bags. We sat on rocks as the sun went down, sharing the last of that honesty-box wine from a proper glass we had brought from the villa like the middle-class tourists we fundamentally are. My partner observed that I had become suspiciously relaxed about not knowing where we were. I admitted that I had, and that it would probably not last once we got home to the Central Line and my inbox.

But that is the thing about accidental discoveries. You cannot plan them, cannot guarantee them, probably should not even look for them too hard. You simply have to take the wrong road sometimes, follow the gravel track, trust that the farmer on the moped knows something you do not. We left Chiclana with sand in the hire car, sugar still probably somewhere in my hair, and absolutely no photographs of the famous things we were meant to see. I have never been more pleased with a holiday in my life.