I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I confidently strode up to the wrong villa and tried to unlock someone else's front door with my rental key. The look on the German family's faces through the window still haunts me. Turns out Villa Cana was two hundred metres further up the dusty track, half-hidden behind a tangle of bougainvillea that I'd mistaken for an abandoned garden. Classic me.

The journey from Ibiza Airport had already set the tone. I'd ignored the hire car's sat nav in favour of "getting a feel for the island," which is code for getting hopelessly lost within twelve minutes of leaving the terminal. Sant Joan de Labritja sits in Ibiza's gloriously undeveloped north, all pine forests and sudden glimpses of turquoise sea, and my rental Fiat and I were having a wonderful time disagreeing about which unmarked dirt road led where. I passed the same goat three times. The goat seemed unimpressed.

But here's the thing about getting properly lost in this corner of Ibiza: you stumble across places no guidebook bothers with. I'd pulled over to swear at a map that suddenly made sense of nothing, and found myself at a tiny cala I'd never heard of, barely a dent in the coastline where a handful of local lads were fishing from the rocks with lines they'd clearly made themselves. No beach bar, no sun loungers, just the smell of pine resin and salt and someone frying squid on a camping stove. I stayed twenty minutes, said barely a word, and left with the sense I'd accidentally gatecrashed something authentic.

Villa Cana itself rewards the wandering approach. From the outside it looks almost deliberately unassuming, a low-slung finca-style building that seems to grow out of the hillside rather than sit on it. The stone walls are thick enough to cool the rooms without air conditioning, and the covered terrace became my headquarters for what I can only describe as "aggressive relaxation." I'd sit with my morning coffee watching the light change over the hills, planning walks I never quite took because I kept getting distracted by the pool. It was that kind of place.

The village of Sant Joan proper is barely five minutes by car, though I managed to stretch it to twenty by taking a wrong turn that deposited me at a roadside shrine to some local saint, candles still burning in a hollowed-out tree trunk. The village itself is small enough to walk across in five minutes, all whitewashed houses and a church that looks like it's been there since before anyone thought to write things down. I ate at a bar where the owner decided what I was having, which turned out to be sobrasada on thick bread and a beer so cold it hurt my teeth. I went back three times.

What I loved most, though, was the walking. Not the planned routes, but the accidental ones. One morning I set out from the villa intending to find a marked path to Portinatx, took a left where I should have gone right, and spent three hours following dry stone walls through farmland that felt utterly untouched by the Ibiza most people know. I found an orange grove where the fruit had fallen and been left to rot, sweetening the air, and a collapsed finca where someone had left a plastic chair facing the sea, presumably decades ago. I sat in it. It held my weight, barely, and I watched a fishing boat putter past so close to shore I could hear the engine.

The north of Ibiza doesn't do big gestures. It doesn't need to. It's content to let you wander until you find something that feels like yours alone, even if you have to get spectacularly lost to get there. By the end of the week, my sat nav sat ignored in the glovebox and my phone stayed on airplane mode. The German family had probably changed their locks. And I had a suntan, sore feet, and absolutely no idea how to explain to anyone back home that the best thing I'd found in Ibiza was a plastic chair in a ruined house, facing the wrong direction, on a path that didn't exist on any map I could find.