I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I confidently marched up to what I thought was our rental cottage, fumbled with the key for a good five minutes, and only realised my mistake when a very confused Spanish gentleman opened the front door from the inside. Turns out I was one street over and several shades redder in the face. My wife found this absolutely hilarious, the children less so, mainly because they were desperate for the loo after our flight into Seville and the hour's drive east.

The actual property, when I finally located it, sat quietly on the edge of Villanueva del Rio y Minas, a former mining town that feels like it has been gently dozing since the last of the ore trains stopped running. The cottage itself was one of those whitewashed Andalusian numbers with terracotta roof tiles and shutters that looked like they had seen off a few decades of fierce summer sun. I loved it instantly, though I did not say this out loud, still smarting from my navigational blunder.

Stepping inside, the first thing that hit me was the coolness. Thick walls, you see. The sort of construction that makes air conditioning feel almost unnecessary, though I was grateful we had it for August. The living area opened straight onto a small courtyard with a plunge pool just big enough to pretend you were doing lengths if you flailed your arms about dramatically. My daughter did exactly this for twenty minutes while my son discovered the outdoor kitchen and immediately declared himself head chef for the week, despite his only culinary achievement to date being beans on toast.

What struck me most, wandering through those first few hours, was how the place managed to feel both properly Spanish and comfortably unpretentious. The kitchen had the basics you actually need rather than fourteen types of juicer. The bedrooms were simple, clean, with those heavy wooden wardrobes that smell faintly of cedar. No boutique hotel nonsense, just a space that wanted you to settle in and stop fussing.

I found myself standing in the courtyard that first evening with a cold beer, watching swallows dart about overhead and listening to nothing much at all. The town below was too small for much evening noise, just the occasional dog and the distant murmur of someone's television through open windows. It was the sort of quiet that makes you aware of how much racket you normally live with, and I felt briefly sheepish about how rarely I notice that back home.

The children, having exhausted themselves in the pool, were actually playing cards together without bickering. My wife was reading on the terrace with a glass of something local. I had another beer and contemplated whether I could be bothered to fire up the barbecue or whether we should wander down to one of the little bars near the old railway station for tapas. The railway station won, obviously. We ate fried fish and patatas bravas while the children made friends with a stray cat and I tried to explain the town's mining history without boring everyone senseless.

Walking back up in the warm dark, the children swinging between us, I thought about how I had nearly missed all of this through sheer stubbornness and a refusal to read street names properly. There is probably a lesson in there somewhere about slowing down and paying attention, but I will save the proper introspection for another day. For now, I am just glad we arrived, mishaps and all, and that the cottage felt like somewhere we could properly exhale for a week.