I should have known the sat nav was up to no good when it tried to send us through what looked like a goat's front garden somewhere outside Ronda. Three hours from Malaga Airport, two coffees, one argument about whether I'd packed the charging cables, and a minor detour through what I can only describe as "decidedly not a road," we finally crawled up the winding lane to our cortijo in Montejaque.

The mishap? Oh, that came earlier. Somewhere on the A-397, convinced I was being helpful, I confidently announced we'd "stock up on essentials" at a supermarket I'd spotted on Google Maps. Twenty minutes of increasingly narrow streets later, we found ourselves in a Mercadona car park with a boot full of shopping and the sudden realisation that I'd bought enough chorizo to feed a small village, but absolutely no loo roll. My partner's face, I must say, achieved a level of stillness that spoke louder than any words. I laughed. He did not. Not then, anyway.

But then we arrived, and something shifted. The cortijo sat there in the late afternoon light, all whitewashed walls and terracotta roof tiles, with the Serrania de Ronda rising behind it like a promise. A finch of some sort darted from an olive tree. Somewhere distant, a dog barked with that particular lazy rhythm you only seem to hear in rural Spain. My partner exhaled, and I felt my shoulders drop about three inches.

The key was in a lockbox, which of course I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time, convinced my thumbs had suddenly become thumbs belonging to someone else entirely. But then the door swung open and that particular coolness hit us, the kind that stone floors and thick walls hold onto even when the outside world is baking. The living room opened onto a terrace through glass doors, and beyond that lay the pool, glinting like a secret.

I will confess to something here. I have a terrible habit of rushing into holiday properties like I'm on some sort of television inspection, flinging open cupboard doors and testing taps with an urgency that makes no sense. This time, I caught myself. The light was doing something extraordinary through the kitchen window, catching the dust motes and turning them golden. I stood there with a carrier bag still in each hand, suddenly aware that I was doing that thing again, that rushing, that missing of moments. I put the bags down. I stepped onto the terrace.

The view stopped me properly. The village of Montejaque clung to its hillside in the near distance, all jumbled houses and church tower, while the valley fell away below us in shades of green and ochre that seemed almost impossibly saturated. A bee worked its way through lavender somewhere to my left. The silence was not empty but full, textured, the kind of quiet that makes you aware of your own breathing.

My partner appeared with two glasses of something cold and local, and we stood there like a pair of idiots, grinning at each other, the loo roll incident already becoming material. The pool water lapped at its edges. Somewhere, a goat bell clanked. I thought about how we'd almost missed this, almost let the journey and the bickering and my own ridiculous chorizo-based overconfidence colour everything. But places like this wait for you, I've decided. They have patience. And as the sun began its slow descent behind those Ronda mountains, painting everything rose and amber, I felt something in me settle that I hadn't even known was restless.

Tomorrow we might walk to the village, or we might not. Tonight, we have everything we need, including, I am relieved to report, the loo roll my partner sensibly produced from his own bag with a look of long-suffering triumph.