I had convinced myself that arriving at a finca in Sant Jordi de ses Salines would be the straightforward part of the holiday. Fly to Ibiza, pick up the hire car, follow the sat nav. Simple. Except my phone decided to overheat precisely as I turned off the PM-801, leaving me squinting at road signs written in what might as well have been ancient runes. I drove past the property twice, each time growing more certain that I was being filmed for some hidden camera show about hapless British tourists. The third pass, I spotted a weathered wooden gate that looked nothing like the photos, and a man on a scooter who took pity on me, gesturing with the universal language of "turn here, you absolute lemon."

The finca itself stopped my breath properly for the first time. Whitewashed walls, terracotta roof tiles, that particular hush that comes from being surrounded by pine trees rather than people. I stood in the courtyard with my suitcase still in the boot, just listening to cicadas and the distant, impossible blue of the sky. The heat hit differently here, thick and deliberate, not the clammy warmth of a British summer but something that felt almost physical, like walking into a well-lit room.

I had planned, with the enthusiastic delusion of someone who books holidays at midnight, to walk the entire coastline from Es Cavallet to Ses Salines on my first afternoon. A proper stretch of the legs after the flight, I told myself, ignoring that it was late June and the thermometer was flirting with thirty-two degrees. I set off with two bottles of water, a hat I immediately regretted wearing, and the boundless optimism of the poorly prepared.

The path from the southern end of Playa d'en Bossa toward Es Cavallet starts promisingly enough. Wooden boardwalks through dunes, the salt flats gleaming white to your left, that extraordinary turquoise water to your right. I walked perhaps twenty minutes before understanding, with the slow dawning horror of the truly stupid, that I had fundamentally misunderstood Mediterranean heat. My water was already suspiciously warm. My shirt had achieved that particular state of dampness that suggests personal failure rather than athletic endeavour. A family passed me on bicycles, looking fresh and continental, and I hated them with the pure intensity of the overheating British abroad.

I reached the first proper cove and simply stopped, defeated by sunshine. Sat on a rock like a discarded laundry item and watched a man in his sixties stride past in proper walking boots, carrying what appeared to be a single almond. The humiliation was comprehensive.

The weather, I realised properly that evening back at the finca, needed to be worked with rather than against. The locals had this figured out. My neighbour, a German woman who had been coming for fifteen years, explained it over wine on her terrace. "Morning walks, evening walks," she said, as if this were a profound philosophy rather than basic survival. "The middle hours are for siesta, for swimming, for doing absolutely nothing with great intention."

So I adapted, with the grudging flexibility of someone who has been mildly humbled. The next days, I rose early, when the air still carried something like coolness and the light fell sideways across the salt flats. Walked north toward Ses Salines itself, the beach where the famous salt has been harvested since Phoenician times, the wooden piles of the old loading pier still standing in the water like rotting teeth. The colours at that hour are extraordinary, pinks and mauves in the shallow pools, the salt crust crackling underfoot like thin ice.

By nine, the heat would be building again, and I would retreat. Swim in the pool at the finca, read on the terrace with the bougainvillea dropping petals onto my book, plan the evening's shorter expedition. There is a particular pleasure to this rhythm, I discovered, once my British impulse toward constant activity had been gently cooked out of me.

One evening I walked south again, toward the lighthouse at Cap de ses Salines, the southernmost point of the island. The path there is rougher, less maintained, and I went too late, the light fading faster than I had anticipated. Had to use my phone torch for the last stretch, which felt faintly ridiculous, a modern intrusion on something ancient. But arriving at that point, the Mediterranean stretching empty in three directions, the lighthouse beam beginning its slow rotation, I felt something shift. The mishap of that first day, the comedy of my heat exhaustion, it all became part of the same story. Learning to move differently, to match my pace to a place rather than demanding it match mine.

I never did complete that original coastal walk in one go. Broke it into pieces, morning and evening, swimming in between, letting the heat dictate rather than defy. The finca became my base for this slower exploration, somewhere to return to, to shower off salt, to sit with a cold drink and watch the swallows darting across the darkening sky. There is wisdom in this, I think, though it came to me reluctantly. Some places ask you to change your rhythm. The trick is listening early enough that you do not have to be defeated by sunshine first.