I should have known the hire car was too small the moment I tried to fit my suitcase behind the driver's seat and it wedged there like a stubborn cork. Three hours of driving from Malaga with my knees practically round my ears, and I arrived in Nigueelas with the posture of a man who'd spent the journey in a medieval torture device.

The village itself appeared suddenly after a bend in the road, all white walls and terracotta roofs clinging to a hillside that seemed far too steep for sensible habitation. I found the property down a narrow lane where an elderly gentleman was leaning against a wall, watching a cat watch a lizard. He looked up as I inched past, my wing mirror nearly grazing his elbow, and offered a nod so slow and deliberate it felt like a formal assessment.

"You're the English," he said. Not a question. A statement of fact, as if my nationality were visible in the way I gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles.

"Guilty," I replied, rolling down the window.

He gestured toward a parking space barely wider than a dinner plate, then spent several minutes directing me with hand signals of increasing theatricality. Back, forward, back, stop, a little more, stop, too much, back again. By the time I emerged, sweating and triumphant, he'd been joined by a woman I assumed was his wife, carrying two shopping bags and a comprehensive air of scepticism.

"He's parked in Maria's spot," she announced, to no one in particular.

"Maria's in Granada until Thursday," he countered.

"Still her spot."

This apparently settled the matter to nobody's satisfaction, and they both stood there regarding me with the patient curiosity usually reserved for zoo animals. I introduced myself and explained I was staying in the village for a week. The woman, who introduced herself as Concha, immediately wanted to know if I could cook. Her husband, Pepe, wanted to know if I played dominoes. I admitted to limited abilities in both departments, which seemed to delight them equally.

"You come tomorrow," Pepe decided. "Five o'clock. Cafe on the square. We teach you dominoes, you teach us nothing, we all drink beer."

Concha snorted and led him away, though not before informing me that the water heater in my property made "a noise like a dying pig" and I shouldn't be alarmed. "It's normal," she said, with the resigned tone of someone who'd long ago accepted sonic pig mortality as a feature of daily life.

The property itself was a modest whitewashed house with a small terrace overlooking a valley of olive groves. Inside, everything was clean and functional and slightly eccentric, the kind of place where you open a cupboard expecting plates and find instead a collection of miniature ceramic frogs. I spent twenty minutes trying to work out the lighting, which operated on a system of switches whose logic seemed to have been designed by a mischievous electrician with a grudge against intuition.

By evening I ventured out to find food, following the sound of voices to a tiny bar where three men sat at a table arguing about football with the passionate intensity of theologians debating doctrine. The barman, a heavyset man with impressive eyebrows, listened to my faltering Spanish and responded in rapid-fire Andalusian that might as well have been a different language entirely. We negotiated a glass of wine and some tapas through a combination of pointing, gesturing, and mutual bewilderment.

"You from the house with the frogs," he said eventually, making it similarly not a question.

Word travels fast in villages where nothing much happens and everyone seems determined that whatever does happen should be thoroughly discussed. I felt briefly like a minor celebrity, or possibly a minor curiosity, which amounts to much the same thing in places like this.

I sat on my terrace that night with my wine and my sore knees and my strange lighting, listening to dogs barking somewhere in the dark and the distant sound of Pepe and Concha's television drifting through open windows. The hire car sat in Maria's spot, innocent and compact. Somewhere, I suspected, a water heater was preparing its porcine swan song.

Tomorrow I would learn dominoes poorly and drink beer well, and perhaps begin to understand how a village this small could feel so entirely sufficient unto itself.