I have never been so grateful for a broken sat nav in all my life. There we were, two hours off the plane at Ibiza Airport, already sweating through our airport outfits in a hire car that smelled faintly of coconut air freshener and regret, when the screen went blank somewhere near Jesus. Not the spiritual experience I was after, admittedly. My partner Dave had insisted on programming the thing himself, waving off my suggestion to just use my phone. "Technology," he'd said, tapping the dashboard with misplaced confidence. "Can't beat it."

Forty minutes of winding lanes later, we were thoroughly beaten by it.

The villa itself, Villa Ramona, sits in the hills above Santa Eulalia des Riu, which I now know because I eventually swallowed my pride and asked a man walking three goats. But that first afternoon, lost among pine forests and dry stone walls, we found things no app would have shown us. A tiny clearing where someone had left a rusted tractor from what looked like the 1950s, now home to a family of cats who regarded us with the disdain we deserved. A concrete water trough where we stopped to splash our faces, only to realise we'd interrupted two elderly men playing cards on a folding table they'd clearly been using for decades.

Dave wanted to turn back. I refused, partly from stubbornness, partly because something about those narrow lanes felt like proper discovery rather than packaged holiday. We passed a finca with a hand-painted sign offering "hierbas caseras" and spent twenty minutes trying to work out if we were meant to knock or if it was simply a boast. In the end, an old woman appeared from nowhere, sold us a bottle of her family's herbal liqueur for seven euros, and vanished again without a word of English between us. That bottle now sits on our kitchen shelf, mostly undrunk because it tastes like liquid Christmas pudding, but I treasure it more than any airport souvenir.

The sat nav finally sputtered back to life just as we crested a hill and saw the sea properly for the first time, that particular Mediterranean blue that makes you understand why people paint things. Villa Ramona appeared around the next bend, all whitewash and terracotta, with a pool terrace that looked out across pine tops to Santa Eulalia's coastline. The owner, a cheerful Mallorcan woman named Margalida, had been waiting two hours and showed no signs of irritation beyond a single raised eyebrow at Dave's attempted explanation involving "technology failures."

She gave us a quick tour that we barely absorbed, still giddy from our accidental expedition. The villa itself was exactly what we'd hoped for: simple, clean, with a kitchen that opened onto that view and bedrooms that stayed cool even in afternoon heat. But what stuck with me was her parting advice, delivered with the casual authority of someone who has watched countless tourists come and go. "The beach everyone goes to," she said, "is not the beach worth finding."

We took her at her word, deliberately getting lost again the next morning, wandering down a track that started behind a supermarket car park and emerged at a cove so small it had no name, just a few local families and a fisherman mending nets who shared his watermelon without being asked. No sun loungers, no beach bar, no signal. I read half a chapter of my book, fell asleep, and woke up with a sunburn that would feature in our holiday photos for days.

That became our rhythm. Villa Ramona as anchor, those hills as invitation. We found a bakery in what Dave's phone insisted was "unmapped territory," run by a man who only opened when he felt like it and produced ensaimadas that ruined airport pastries forever. We stumbled into a village fiesta, complete with giants on stilts and a brass band that played with more enthusiasm than tuning, and ate sobrassada sandwiches at eleven at night surrounded by children who treated the whole thing as completely normal.

The thing about getting properly lost is that it strips away the performance of being a tourist. You cannot curate an experience you did not plan. You cannot review what you cannot name. Standing on a hillside one evening, watching the sun set over a landscape the guidebooks had ignored, I felt something shift in how I understood the place. Ibiza's reputation is so thoroughly owned by its clubs and its super yachts that I had assumed the quieter version was a consolation prize, something for people too old or too boring for the real thing. But those wrong turns showed me something else entirely: an island still living its own life alongside the one sold to visitors, generous to those willing to miss their turnings.

We did eventually find the famous beaches, the restaurants with waiting lists, the pretty marina of Santa Eulalia itself, all lovely in their way. But I think of our holiday now in terms of what we could not have found on purpose. The goat man. The card players. The wordless transaction of hierbas caseras. Even the sat nav's betrayal feels like gift in retrospect, though Dave still maintains it was user error and refuses to discuss it.

On our last morning, I walked up the lane behind Villa Ramona alone, following a path that seemed to lead nowhere in particular, and found a small stone shrine to the Virgin Mary, decorated with fresh flowers and a plastic cup of water that someone had placed there recently. I sat for a while, not praying exactly, just being present in a place that asked nothing of me. The sun rose higher. A lizard darted across the stones. Somewhere below, I could hear Dave calling my name, slightly panicked, wondering where I'd got to.

I smiled, and stayed a moment longer, enjoying being lost one final time.