I have never been so grateful for air conditioning in my entire life, and that includes the summer I spent working in a pizza kitchen with a broken extractor fan. The taxi from Palma airport had been mercifully brief, but by the time we pulled up at Alegria Mediterranea in Calvia, I had already committed the cardinal sin of holiday packing: wearing jeans in late July. The denim was practically fused to my thighs, and I am fairly certain I left a small puddle on the leather seat that the driver will be discovering for weeks.

The mishap, though, came moments later. There I was, trying to look composed and sophisticated for the key handover, when my wheeled suitcase caught on a rogue paving stone and performed what I can only describe as an enthusiastic pirouette. It careered into a potted olive tree, which wobbled dramatically before settling at a jaunty angle that suggested permanent trauma. I spent the next ten minutes apologising in increasingly desperate Spanish to the property manager, who was far more concerned about whether I had remembered to buy sunscreen. "First week of August," she said, with the knowing weariness of someone who had watched countless Brits turn the colour of emergency flares. "The sun here, it does not forgive."

She was not wrong. The seasonal timing of this trip had shaped everything before we had even stepped through the door. Alegria Mediterranea sat in that particular pocket of Majorcan summer where the days stretched long and lazy, the kind where afternoon movement felt actively foolish. The villa itself was clearly built with this rhythm in mind. Terracotta tiles that stayed cool underfoot despite the ferocious midday heat. Shutters that actually functioned rather than merely decorated. A covered terrace where we would spend most evenings, watching the light change from harsh white to something softer and more forgiving.

That first afternoon, we did what sensible people do in high summer: absolutely nothing. The pool became our entire universe. I floated on my back, jeans thankfully abandoned in favour of sensible swimwear, and listened to the cicadas screaming their afternoon chorus from the surrounding pines. The heat had driven every living thing to some form of surrender. Even the local cats, usually so territorial, had arranged themselves in patches of shade with the resigned cooperation of prisoners sharing a cell.

By six o'clock, something miraculous happened. The temperature dropped just enough to make the outdoors feel welcoming again. We wandered down to the local mercadillo, where the evening market was just setting up in the relative cool. Summer had transformed the usual sleepy Calvia into something more sociable, more alive. Families promenaded slowly, children still in swimwear eating ice creams that melted faster than they could be consumed. I bought a fan from an elderly woman who looked at my still-pink shoulders with the expression of a battlefield medic seeing fresh casualties.

The seasonal reality of a Majorcan August is that you surrender to it or you suffer. That first evening, sitting on our terrace with something cold and local, I felt the peculiar humility that comes from being thoroughly outmatched by weather. There is no bravado available when the thermometer sits where it sits. You adapt, you slow down, you become temporarily Mediterranean in your rhythms.

I thought about this as I watched the sun finally dip below the distant hills, the sky performing its daily spectacular in shades of apricot and rose. My suitcase had left a small scuff on the olive tree pot, a permanent reminder of my arrival. The tree itself seemed to have recovered its dignity. We had a week ahead of us, and the season had already taught me its first lesson: there is no point rushing anything in this heat. I raised my glass to the olive tree, to the cicadas, to the long slow days that waited. Some holidays you plan. Others, like this one, simply unfold at their own seasonal pace, and your only job is to keep up.