I have always believed that the best holidays are the ones where you accidentally take a wrong turn and find something brilliant. My recent trip to Arenys de Munt in Catalonia proved this theory beyond all doubt, though not before a small mishap involving a hire car, a very narrow lane, and an extremely unimpressed local farmer.

The journey from Barcelona airport had started well enough. I had picked up my Fiat Panda, felt rather smug about navigating the motorway, and even managed to order a coffee in Spanish without accidentally declaring my love for the barista. Things went slightly pear-shaped when my sat nav decided that the most direct route to my holiday home involved what I can only describe as a goat track. I found myself wedged between two dry stone walls, wondering if my insurance covered "existential regret." A man in a flat cap appeared from a field, gestured with his stick, and directed me back to civilisation with the weary patience of someone who has rescued many lost Britons before me.

The property itself, when I finally arrived, was worth every moment of panic. A traditional Catalan farmhouse with terracotta tiles and wooden shutters, it sat among pine trees with views down towards the coast. I dumped my bags, poured a glass of something local, and decided that getting lost had rather been the point all along.

The next morning I set out with no particular plan, which is how I discovered the old stone water trough on the edge of town. I had been aiming for the main square and took a left where I should have taken a right. There it was, covered in moss, with a trickle of water still running through it. An elderly woman was filling bottles, and we managed a conversation in my broken Spanish and her broken English. She told me her grandmother had used it, and her grandmother before that. I would never have found it on purpose.

That set the tone for the entire week. I wandered down lanes that petered out into nothing, found myself in olive groves with no idea how I had got there, and stumbled upon a tiny chapel dedicated to Saint Anthony that did not appear on any map I could find. The door was unlocked. Inside, someone had left fresh flowers and a candle was burning. I sat for ten minutes in the cool silence, feeling like I had interrupted a private conversation between the village and its saint.

One afternoon I got spectacularly lost trying to find a marked walking trail. The path I was following simply stopped at a collapsed wall. Rather than retrace my steps, I scrambled over and found myself in an abandoned terraced garden. Fruit trees had gone wild, and the ground was carpeted with fallen figs. I ate three, slightly fermented and absolutely perfect, while a donkey watched me from the next field with what I can only describe as philosophical detachment.

The village of Arenys de Munt itself rewarded aimless wandering. I found a bakery down a side street where the owner was experimenting with ancient grain varieties, and we spent twenty minutes discussing sourdough starters with the enthusiasm of people who have no one else to talk to about such things. I discovered a workshop where a man was hand-making traditional Catalan ceramics, and left with a bowl I definitely did not need but absolutely had to own.

By the end of the week, I stopped even pretending to have a plan. Each morning I would walk out of the farmhouse and choose directions based on which looked least promising. This is how I found the ruined dry stone shelter where shepherds once weathered storms, now home to a family of feral cats who regarded me with the same suspicion as the donkey. It is how I discovered the viewpoint that revealed the Mediterranean glittering unexpectedly between two hills, a sight no guidebook had prepared me for.

On my final evening, I walked back to that first water trough. The same woman was there, and she laughed to see me again. We did not need much language to share the joke. I had come to Catalonia with a list of things to see and had barely touched it. Instead, I had collected moments of accidental beauty, conversations stumbled into, landscapes that revealed themselves only to the thoroughly lost.

I drove back to the airport the long way round, deliberately. The farmer in the flat cap was in his field again. He raised his stick in greeting, or possibly warning. I waved back, grateful for the wrong turn that had started it all, and already plotting how to get lost somewhere new.