I have never been so happy to see a stone wall in my life. After twelve hours of driving from Portsmouth, two ferries, one questionable motorway sandwich, and a sat-nav that clearly fancied itself as a rally co-driver, we finally crawled up the lane to our holiday let in Vimianzo. Galicia had been a vague green blob on my mental map of Spain, somewhere left of everything else, and I was absolutely shattered.

The mishap happened about three miles from the property. I had stopped to admire what I thought was a particularly handsome cow, being the sophisticated rural tourist that I am, and managed to reverse slightly into a very solid granite gatepost. Not fast. Not dramatically. Just enough to rearrange the bumper's relationship with the rest of the car and to fill the boot with the distinct smell of crushed plastic. My partner sat in silence for a full minute, which in relationship terms is roughly equivalent to a volcanic eruption. "Well," she finally said, "at least the cow looked impressed."

We limped the final stretch with the bumper making a gentle flapping noise like a depressed seagull. The lane narrowed, the trees closed in, and then suddenly there was the house. Stone, of course. Thick walls, small windows, that particular mossy darkness that Galician stone gets from years of proper Atlantic rain. A woman was waiting by the door with keys and the patient expression of someone who has seen many tired English people arrive in various states of disrepair.

I attempted to explain about the bumper in my GCSE Spanish, which somehow involved the word for "cheese" by accident. She waved it off, handed us the keys, and pointed to where we could park the wounded vehicle. The house had a small garden with a stone bench, some lavender fighting its way through the damp soil, and a view down towards nothing in particular except fields and more stone walls and the general greenness that makes Galicia feel less like Spain and more like Wales that has been left out in the rain for a thousand years.

Inside, the smell hit me immediately. Wood smoke, old stone, something herbal that I later realised was dried bay leaves hung in the kitchen. The ceilings were lower than I expected, the stairs steeper, the whole place slightly tilting as if it had settled into the hillside centuries ago and saw no reason to straighten up now. I kept banging my head on a beam in the sitting room until my partner started laughing every time I walked through, which became genuinely annoying by the fourth time but also somehow perfect.

The kitchen had a proper wood-burning range, black and slightly terrifying, and a table that could easily seat eight people who all apparently needed to be very close friends. The windows were small and deep-set, framing little squares of green like paintings hung deliberately off-centre. I found myself standing at the sink for longer than necessary, watching a hen scratch about in the lane, feeling the particular stillness that only comes after a very long journey when you finally stop moving.

That evening we walked perhaps half a mile down the lane, just to stretch our legs and to discover that I had packed entirely the wrong shoes for Galician country walking. The light went soft and golden in that way it does before Atlantic weather rolls in, and we passed another stone house with washing strung between windows and someone practising bagpipes inside. Bagpipes. In Spain. I turned to my partner with what I imagine was a deeply stupid expression, and she just nodded. "Galicia," she said, as if that explained everything, which I suppose it did.

We walked back as the first spots of rain arrived, perfectly on cue, and I felt the bump on my head from the beam, and heard the bumper still gently flapping in the evening breeze, and thought that this was exactly how holidays should begin. Slightly broken, slightly confused, and completely unable to remember the Spanish word for "sorry about your gatepost."