I have never been brilliant with directions, which is how I ended up driving our hire car down what I can only describe as a goat track somewhere west of Villaviciosa, convinced the sat nav knew something I did not. It did not. My partner sat in silence for a full three minutes before gently suggesting we might ask the elderly chap walking his dog. I rolled down the window, attempted my best Spanish, and learned we were approximately two miles from where we needed to be and roughly five hundred years from the twenty-first century in terms of road quality. We reversed with dignity, or at least with as much dignity as one can manage while avoiding a ditch and the judgmental gaze of a border collie.

The proper road, when we found it, wound through apple orchards so heavy with fruit you could smell the cider waiting to happen. Villaviciosa sits in a valley that feels tucked away from everything, green and soft and somehow always catching the light at an angle that makes you think you have wandered into a painting done by someone who really understood the colour green. Our villa appeared through a gap in a hedgerow, and I will admit I actually said "oh" out loud, which is my highest form of praise.

The property itself was one of those solid Asturian houses with thick walls and wooden beams that have seen generations come and go. The owner had left a bottle of local sidra on the kitchen table, which we opened with more enthusiasm than skill, sending a good portion across the terracotta tiles. We mopped it up with a tea towel and decided this counted as blessing the house. The garden sloped down to nothing in particular, just grass and wildflowers and a view of hills that rolled away like a held breath. A hammock hung between two trees, slightly sagging, exactly right.

I had brought three books with the serious intention of reading them. I managed half of one, and I consider this a triumph. The days developed a rhythm so lazy it barely qualified as rhythm at all. Morning coffee on the terrace, watching the mist lift from the valley in strips. A walk into the village for bread and the local cheese, which is sharp and crumbly and demands to be eaten with nothing more than a knife and greed. Back by midday, when the sun hit the garden properly, and then the serious business of doing absolutely nothing at all.

There is a particular pleasure in being warm enough to stay outside without purpose. I spent one afternoon attempting to identify birds from a guidebook I found on a shelf, getting most of them wrong and not particularly minding. Another day I walked to the nearest beach, perhaps twenty minutes on foot, a small cove where the Bay of Biscay fussed and frothed against rocks worn smooth. I took my shoes off, paddled like a child, and walked back with sand in my pockets and no memory of what I had been worrying about before we arrived.

We did venture to the harbour at Tazones one evening, drawn by the promise of grilled seafood and the fact that we had not moved more than three miles from the villa all day. The village clings to the coastline in that way Spanish fishing villages do, all narrow passages and sudden glimpses of water. We ate octopus and watched the light fade, and I felt something in my shoulders release that I had not realised I was holding.

The thing about a place like that villa is it teaches you how little you actually need. I stopped checking my phone after day two. I stopped making plans entirely. There was always another morning, another slow breakfast, another hour in the hammock watching the swallows dart above the apple trees. My partner read aloud from a novel I had already abandoned, and I fell asleep to the sound of her voice, waking to find the book closed on my chest and the afternoon half gone.

On our last day I walked the orchard boundary one final time, picking a windfall apple that tasted of honey and slight decay, perfect in its imperfection. The border collie from our arrival day appeared at a gate, still judgmental, still correct about everything. I saluted him with my apple and walked back to pack, already half-planning when we might return.

Some holidays you come back from with stories and photographs and a sense of having been busy. Others you come back from with sand in your shoes and a half-finished novel and the vague, happy realisation that you did absolutely nothing worth mentioning, and that this was exactly the point.