Getting to La Carlota was supposed to be the easy bit. I'd flown into Malaga, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of pine air freshener and regret, and pointed myself north towards the Andalusian countryside with the confidence of someone who had, admittedly, not bothered to download an offline map. Within twenty minutes I was hopelessly lost down a dirt track flanked by orange groves, waving apologetically at a farmer who watched me perform a twelve-point turn with the patient amusement of a man who had seen this exact scene a thousand times before. My phone, in a final act of betrayal, died just as I spotted what I was fairly certain was the same goat for the third time. I arrived at the finca nearly an hour late, dusty, slightly hysterical, and clutching a warm bottle of water from a petrol station that had seemed like a mirage at the time.

But then the gates opened, and something in my shoulders dropped about three inches.

La Carlota sits among olive trees that look like they have been standing since before anyone thought to invent stress. The house itself is that perfect sort of Spanish country place, all thick white walls and terracotta tiles, with a pool that catches the afternoon light and turns it into something you could almost drink. My hosts, a cheerful couple from Manchester who had made the leap to Andalusia a decade ago, didn't mention my dishevelled state beyond a kindly offered glass of something cold and local. I drank it on the terrace, watching a gecko perform its evening patrol across the wall, and felt the last of my motorway tension dissolve into the warm air.

The first morning, I woke without an alarm for the first time in months. The shutters had kept the room deliciously cool, and when I pushed them open the sunlight hit the courtyard with that particular Andalusian intensity that makes you understand why people paint. I made coffee in the small kitchen, slightly baffled by the stovetop espresso maker until I remembered my father had one just like it in the eighties, and carried it outside in my pyjamas. A neighbour's rooster provided commentary. I did absolutely nothing until eleven, and it felt like an accomplishment.

The days that followed settled into a rhythm so gentle it barely qualified as a rhythm at all. I read three novels on the terrace, moving my chair periodically to follow the shade like a very slow sundial. The pool became my afternoon office, though the only work involved was deciding whether to float on my back or my front. When I did venture out, it was to the nearby village for bread and cheese and tomatoes that actually tasted of something, or to a tiny bar where an elderly man explained the olive harvest to me in rapid Spanish that I understood perhaps one word in ten. I nodded enthusiastically anyway. He seemed pleased.

There was a moment, perhaps on the fourth day, when I caught myself feeling faintly guilty about this profound laziness. I had brought walking shoes, after all. There were guidebooks in my bag, unopened. I had intended to be the sort of traveller who properly explored, who came back with stories and blisters and photographs of notable churches. Instead I had become someone who measured time by the progress of shade across a courtyard and considered a trip to the local shop a significant outing. I mentioned this to my host over a glass of sherry one evening, this nagging sense that I ought to be doing more. She laughed, in the way of someone who had long ago made peace with such things, and poured me another. "That's why people come here," she said. "To remember what it feels like to not be busy."

She was right, of course. By the end of the week, I had stopped checking my watch entirely. I knew it was time for lunch when my stomach told me, time for a swim when the heat became insistent, time for bed when the swallows stopped their evening circuits and the first stars appeared. I finished my novels. I developed a small tan in places I had missed with sunscreen. I learned the names of precisely none of the birds that visited the garden, but greeted them with familiar pleasure all the same.

On my last morning, I packed my bag with the same inefficient slowness that had characterised everything that week. The drive back to Malaga was straightforward this time, though I still managed to take one wrong turn out of sheer nostalgic habit. I didn't mind. The orange groves looked lovely in the early light, and I was in no particular hurry to be anywhere else.