I should have known the holiday proper had begun when the sat-nav tried to send us up a goat track. We'd flown into Malaga, picked up a hire car that smelled faintly of air freshener and regret, and set off for Zahara de la Sierra with the sort of confidence that only comes from having done absolutely no proper research. My partner had typed the address into Google Maps while I was busy arguing with the car hire woman about whether we really needed the extra insurance. We didn't, apparently, though I would come to question this assumption rather forcefully.

The drive itself was magnificent in that slightly terrifying Andalusian way, all cork oak forests and sudden glimpses of turquoise reservoirs tucked between hills. Then the road narrowed. Then it narrowed again. Then it became what I can only describe as a suggestion of tarmac, curling round the hillside with a stone wall on one side and nothing at all on the other. I was doing approximately twelve miles per hour and sweating like I was in a sauna fully clothed, which in a sense I was, because the air conditioning had packed up somewhere outside Ronda.

"Turn left in fifty metres," the sat-nav announced, with the calm authority of someone who has never actually been to rural Andalusia. We turned left, and immediately understood our error. The road became a track, then a path, then what I can only assume was somebody's driveway. A small dog regarded us with the expression of a creature who has seen this exact scene play out many times before. We reversed, which in a vehicle the size of a small tank and on a surface barely wider than a bicycle was not straightforward. My partner made helpful suggestions. I made less helpful responses. By the time we found the proper turning, marked by a weathered sign that I swear had not been there thirty seconds earlier, we were both ready for either a stiff drink or a divorce.

And then we crested the final hill, and Zahara de la Sierra appeared below us, and I forgot to be annoyed. The village clings to the mountainside in that impossible way that makes you wonder how anyone ever thought building it was a sensible idea. White houses stacked like sugar cubes, a castle ruin watching from above, and the whole thing reflected in the still water of the reservoir. We found our holiday home eventually, down one of those narrow lanes where you hold your breath and hope nobody is coming the other way. A woman was watering geraniums in a window box. She nodded at us as if we were expected, as if the village had known we were coming all along and had merely been waiting for us to find our way.

The property itself was one of those traditional village houses that looks modest from outside and unfolds like a secret once you're through the door. A small courtyard with a lemon tree, tiles worn smooth by generations of feet, a roof terrace that caught the evening sun and held it like something precious. We dumped our bags and immediately got lost again, which became something of a theme for the week. The village rewards the wandering foot. Turn down an alley that looks like a dead end and find a tiny plaza where old men play dominoes and drink tinto de verano from plastic cups. Follow a flight of steps that seems to lead nowhere and discover a viewpoint where a single bench faces the reservoir and the mountains beyond, positioned with the precision of a landscape painting.

On our second morning, determined to be purposeful tourists, we set out for the castle. We found it eventually, though not before taking a wrong turn that deposited us in somebody's back garden, where a very polite teenager directed us back to the proper path while his grandmother looked on with the amused tolerance of someone who has directed many lost foreigners in her time. The castle itself was worth the confusion, all crumbling walls and wildflowers and views that make you feel slightly dizzy. But it was the wrong turn that stayed with me, the unexpected garden, the brief human connection.

We spent the rest of the week deliberately getting lost. A path down to the reservoir that started as a proper trail and degenerated into something you could only navigate by following the occasional painted arrow on a rock. We found a tiny beach, if you can call it that, more a patch of shingle where the water lapped gently and a family were cooking sardines on a disposable barbecue, the smell of charred fish and woodsmoke hanging in the warm air. They offered us one, because this is Andalusia, and refusing would have been rude. It was the best sardine I have ever eaten, though I should note that my sample size of freshly caught, beach-barbecued sardines is admittedly small.

Another afternoon, chasing the shade through the village, we stumbled into what I can only describe as a cave of cheese. A tiny shop, more of a room really, where a man in his seventies kept wheels of local queso in a cool stone cellar. He cut us samples with a knife that had clearly been doing this job for decades, and we bought more than we could reasonably eat, carried it home in paper that grew translucent with oil, and ate it on the roof terrace as the sun went down and the swallows began their evening circuits.

I am not, by nature, someone who wanders without purpose. I like a plan, a list, a clear objective. But Zahara de la Sierra taught me something about the value of not knowing where you're going, of following the alley that looks too narrow, of trusting that there will be something worth finding even if it's not what you were looking for. The village doesn't yield its secrets to the efficient. It rewards the patient, the curious, the slightly foolish.

On our final evening, we found ourselves on that same bench overlooking the reservoir, the one we'd discovered by accident on our first wandering afternoon. The water had turned the colour of molten metal in the late sun, and the village was beginning to light up below us, windows glowing amber against the white walls. My partner observed, with the particular wisdom that comes from a second glass of manzanilla, that we'd spent a week trying to get lost and had somehow found exactly where we wanted to be. I thought about arguing the logic of this, because I am me, but instead I just sat there and watched the light change and felt, for perhaps the first time in a long while, entirely unbothered by the fact that I had no idea what came next.