I have never been so grateful for a broken sat nav in my life. There we were, me and my partner, crawling up some winding road in our hire car, convinced we were heading for San Bartolome de Tirajana village itself. The screen kept insisting we take a left that clearly led to somebody's goat shed. Three U-turns later, we found ourselves on a dusty track between banana plantations, wondering if we'd accidentally driven into a film set for a Canarian western.

The villa, when we finally spotted its terracotta roof poking through the palm trees, turned out to be nowhere near the village centre at all. This was my first lesson in Gran Canarian geography. San Bartolome de Tirajana is technically a municipality that sprawls across the south-east like a sunbather refusing to move. Our place sat in the quieter folds near the coast, surrounded by nothing much except birdsong and the occasional distant bark of a dog who clearly had opinions about tourists.

The mishap that defined our arrival? I had confidently announced I would pop to the shops for provisions. The nearest supermarket was, according to my phone, eleven minutes away. I returned two hours later with a bag of plantains I couldn't identify, some local cheese that smelled like feet, and a very real fear that I'd been driving in circles past the same abandoned mango stand. My partner, who had spent this time peacefully by the pool, looked at my haul and asked if we were having a themed dinner from 1974.

But here's the thing about getting properly lost in this corner of Gran Canaria. You stumble into places no brochure bothers with. The morning after my supermarket odyssey, we set off with no particular plan, took a wrong turn past the golf course near Maspalomas, and found ourselves in a tiny hamlet where an elderly man was selling honey from his garage. No sign, no opening hours, just three jars on a plastic table and a handshake that lasted approximately four minutes. That honey now lives in our cupboard in Manchester, and I guard it like liquid gold.

Another afternoon, we meant to walk to the nearest beach and somehow ended up on a cliff path between two nameless coves. The path was technically closed, which we discovered from a faded sign roughly halfway along. By then, pride and stubbornness made turning back impossible. We emerged onto black volcanic sand where a single fisherman sat mending nets, who nodded at us as if strangers appearing from nowhere was entirely routine. We swam in water so clear it felt like a trick, and I stood there wondering how many times I'd missed moments like this by actually knowing where I was going.

The villa itself became our base for glorious purposelessness. Its pool caught the morning sun perfectly for lazy floating, and the terrace became our evening spot for watching the light change over the distant mountains. We cooked with vegetables from a market we'd never have found without taking a road that looked promising and wasn't. One evening, driving back from what we thought was a restaurant recommendation, we spotted a roadside grill with plastic chairs and a queue of locals. The chorizo there remains the best I've ever tasted, and I have no idea what the place was called. We never found it again, which feels right somehow.

By the end of the week, I'd stopped checking my phone for directions entirely. We found a walking trail behind a cemetery that led to a viewpoint where you could see the dunes at Maspalomas in one direction and mountains in the other, with absolutely nobody else around. We discovered a bar where the owner played dominoes with himself and served wine in tumblers. We got lost so thoroughly one morning that we had to ask directions from a woman walking three goats, and I understood approximately none of her rapid Spanish but followed her pointing with complete trust.

Sitting on that terrace on our final evening, watching the sun drop behind the ridge, I realised something. I spend so much of ordinary life trying to be efficient, optimised, always taking the recommended route. Gran Canaria had gently, persistently, refused to let me. The broken sat nav, the circular drives, the closed paths and unmarked turns had given me something I didn't know I needed. The island wasn't hiding its treasures; it was simply waiting for me to stop looking so hard and start wandering instead. I raised my tumbler of questionable local wine to the woman with the goats, wherever she was, and made a silent promise to get lost more often.