I should have known the Sat Nav was up to no good the moment it tried to send us through what looked like someone's herb garden just outside Granada. Three hours from Malaga Airport, two coffees, one slightly tense roundabout moment in the city centre, and there we were, crawling up a narrow lane with olive trees scraping both wing mirrors. My partner was doing that particular jaw-clench that means I ought to offer to get out and check the width. I did not offer. Instead I said something deeply unhelpful about "character" and "authentic Andalusian experience."

The mishap, when it came, was almost impressively stupid. We'd stopped at a little supermarket in the village below for supplies, you see, and in my enthusiasm for local cheeses I had completely failed to notice that our hire car's boot now contained a bottle of olive oil lying on its side. Not sealed properly. Not even close. By the time we reached the cortijo, a full third of the bottle had liberated itself across the shopping, the boot carpet, and my favourite linen trousers. I smelled like a tapas bar's back room. My partner smelled like patience itself, which was somehow worse.

The property sat among hills that rolled away like crumpled velvet, all ochre and sage green, with the Sierra Nevada catching the late sun behind us. A low stone wall, terracotta pots with geraniums, and a heavy wooden door that needed a proper shoulder to shift. I stood there, clutching my bag of oil-soaked groceries, suddenly aware that I was about to trail EVOO across someone's beautiful tiled threshold.

But the door opened onto coolness and shadow, and the smell of the oil faded against jasmine drifting through open shutters. The living room stretched out with beamed ceilings far higher than the exterior suggested, and somewhere a ceiling fan turned lazily, barely disturbing the afternoon stillness. I dumped my bags with more relief than grace and wandered straight through to the kitchen, which was all terracotta floors and wooden counters and a window framing an olive grove that looked almost suspiciously picturesque, as if it had been arranged by a particularly keen set dresser.

The pool sat beyond a covered terrace, its water still and turquoise, reflecting nothing but sky and the corner of a whitewashed outbuilding. I had planned to swim immediately, to wash away the journey and the humiliation, but instead I found myself on a wicker chair with a lukewarm beer from that compromised shopping bag, watching swallows dart across the water. The oil stain on my trousers had reached a sort of artistic saturation point. I looked, I realised, like a man who had wrestled an octopus and lost.

My partner emerged with two glasses of something cold and local, and we sat in a silence that slowly stopped being the post-argument kind and became something else entirely. The light shifted from gold to rose. A dog barked somewhere down the valley, and another answered. I thought about how I would remember this moment, the ridiculousness and the beauty all knotted together, the smell of jasmine winning out over olive oil, the particular peace of arriving somewhere that asks nothing of you but presence.

We did not swim that evening. We walked the grounds instead, found lemon trees and a herb garden that the owner clearly tended with care, and I resisted every urge to make a joke about my trousers matching the soil. Dinner was bread and the surviving cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, eaten at a table that wobbled slightly until my partner folded a napkin under one leg. Perfect, I thought, though I did not say it aloud. Some things you keep for yourself, at least until the morning.