I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I managed to leave my sunglasses on the kitchen table at home. Not just any sunglasses, mind you, but the only pair I own, and this was late June in Majorca, when the sun apparently has a personal vendetta against pale British skin. So there I was, squinting like a confused mole, driving our hire car from Palma airport towards Porto Cristo with the air conditioning blasting and my partner doing an admirable job of navigating despite my constant complaints about the glare.

The journey itself was straightforward enough, though I did nearly take us into a roundabout twice, which my partner has since described as "character building" and I have described as "evidence that left-hand driving is a conspiracy." By the time we spotted the signs for Porto Cristo, I was ready to abandon the car and walk the rest of the way. The landscape had shifted from the flat agricultural plains near the airport to something more rugged and compelling, with pine-clad hills and the occasional glimpse of that impossible Mediterranean blue that makes you wonder if someone has cranked up the saturation.

Can Crespinetlo Nou sits on the outskirts of Porto Cristo, and I will be honest, I nearly missed the turning. The lane wound upwards through terraced gardens heavy with fig trees and what I later learned were apricots, the late June heat already turning them golden. The stone walls were warm to the touch when I finally stopped to check we were in the right place, and the cicadas were going at it with such enthusiasm that I briefly worried about my hearing.

The villa itself appeared gradually, as if shy, revealing itself through a gap in the olive trees. It is one of those traditional Majorcan finca-style properties, all honey-coloured stone and terracotta, with a swimming pool that glinted temptingly in the afternoon light. I stood there for a moment, still squinting, and felt something shift. The frantic energy of the journey, the airport, the driving, the lost sunglasses, it all seemed to settle in the heat.

That is the thing about visiting in late June, I think. The tourist season is properly underway but has not yet reached the August intensity. The evenings still carry a softness, a lingering light that stretches past nine o'clock and makes you forget about dinner until your stomach complains. We arrived on a Saturday, and I could hear distant music from Porto Cristo itself, some local fiesta perhaps, carried on the warm air.

I made straight for the pool, shoes still on, and sat on the edge with my feet in the water. The stone was hot against my back. My partner appeared with two glasses of something cold and local, and we sat there in that particular silence that comes from finally arriving somewhere you have been anticipating for months. The cicadas continued their relentless chorus. A gecko darted across the wall behind us. I thought about my sunglasses, sitting uselessly in my kitchen in England, and found I could not muster any real annoyance.

The evening brought a different quality entirely. We walked down to Porto Cristo for dinner, a gentle twenty-minute stroll that became thirty because I kept stopping to look at things, the way the light fell through the pines, the smell of jasmine from someone's garden wall, the distant sound of a dog barking that echoed in the stillness. The harbour was busy with families eating late, children still playing on the sand despite the hour, the season having drawn everyone outdoors into the forgiving warmth.

I bought a cheap pair of sunglasses from a tourist shop near the water, the kind that make you look faintly ridiculous, and wore them with the satisfaction of someone who has solved a problem through pure pragmatism. We ate grilled squid and drank a local white wine that tasted of minerals and sunshine, and I watched the boats in the harbour rocking gently on a sea that still held the day's heat.

Walking back up to the villa in darkness, the path lit by our phone torches and the occasional motion-sensor light from a neighbouring property, I felt the particular pleasure of returning somewhere that already felt familiar. The pool lay still and black in the night, reflecting stars we could barely see for the villa's lights. We sat out for another hour, perhaps two, talking in that desultory way that holidays permit, about nothing much, about everything.

That first day set the pattern, I think, not through any conscious decision but because the season allowed it. The long mornings, the slow breakfasts on the terrace with apricots from the garden, the gradual migration to the pool as the heat built, the late afternoons when Porto Cristo became worth visiting again, the evenings that stretched luxuriously into night. Late June in Majorca does not hurry you. It holds you in a warm palm and lets you take your time.

I kept those cheap sunglasses for the entire fortnight, and when I found my proper pair waiting at home, I felt an odd affection for the replacements. They sit in a drawer now, slightly scratched, a reminder of that first afternoon when I sat with my feet in cool water and finally, properly, arrived.