By the time we finally found Villa Vella, I had already reversed into a lemon tree, argued with a sat nav that seemed convinced Ibiza was actually Belgium, and discovered that my hire car's air conditioning consisted of rolling down the window and hoping. The villa itself appeared at the end of a dusty track like something from a fever dream, all whitewashed walls and bougainvillea, with a small man in a straw hat standing in the driveway eating what I later learned was an entire melon with a spoon.

"You're the English," he said, not a question. This was Toni, the caretaker, who had apparently been briefed on our arrival with the kind of detail normally reserved for witness protection programmes. He squinted at the scrape on my bumper, the lemon tree matter, and nodded slowly. "The last ones did the same. Different tree though. Come, I show you the boiler."

The boiler, it transpired, was a character in its own right. Toni spoke to it. Cooed at it, really, while adjusting dials with the tenderness of a man tuning a Stradivarius. "She's moody in July," he confided, patting the metal casing. "Like my sister-in-law." He laughed so hard at this that he had to steady himself against my shoulder, and I found myself laughing too, though I'd never met the sister-in-law and suspected I never should.

Maria appeared from somewhere with lemonade that tasted of actual lemons and something else I couldn't identify. "Herbs from my mother's garden," she said, watching me drink with the intensity of a exam invigilator. "Good for the digestion. You look like you need it." She was Toni's wife of forty-two years, though she introduced herself as "the one who actually runs things," and I believed her immediately. Within minutes she'd established that I was unmarried, my companion was "too thin," and that we absolutely must visit the fish market in Sant Antoni on Thursday because her cousin worked there and would give us "the proper stuff, not the tourist rubbish."

The pool man came that evening, a lanky figure called Pere who communicated almost exclusively through meaningful shrugs and occasional whistles. He'd been cleaning pools on this corner of the island since before the airport existed, or so Maria claimed. He certainly moved around Villa Vella with the proprietorial ease of someone who'd helped build it, which perhaps he had. When I tried to make conversation about the water temperature, he shrugged, whistled something that sounded vaguely like a Radiohead B-side, and pointed at the sunset. Message received, I supposed.

Dinner that first night was interrupted by the neighbour's cat, a battle-scarred tortoiseshell who walked through the open kitchen door like a regular paying guest and demanded cheese with a persistence that bordered on harassment. "That's Franco," said Maria, appearing from nowhere with a dishcloth over her shoulder. "Named by my brother. He's a historian, very political. The cat doesn't care." Franco received his cheese and departed without acknowledgment, which felt about right.

Lying by the pool later, slightly sun-drunk and full of Maria's paella, I found myself thinking about how I'd imagined this trip. I'd pictured something sleeker, somehow, more curated, the Ibiza of magazines and carefully composed Instagram grids. Instead I had a moody boiler, a political cat, and a pool cleaner who communicated in bird noises. And I realised, with the kind of clarity that only arrives after too much sun and just enough local wine, that this was infinitely better. The real island, or a corner of it anyway, with its small absurdities and generous, unhurried people who seemed genuinely puzzled by the concept of rushing anywhere.

Toni had left a note on the kitchen table, written in capitals and slightly smudged: "BOILER: TALK TO HER. POOL: PERE COMES TUESDAY. FRANCO: NO MORE CHEESE, HE'S FAT." I folded it carefully into my pocket, already knowing I'd keep it long after the tan faded.