We had barely made it out of Palma airport when I realised I had left my phone in the hire car. Not on the seat, not in the glovebox, but perched on the roof like some sort of modern art installation. My partner, bless her, did not even flinch. She simply wound down the window, leaned out at a roundabout, and retrieved it while I sat there contemplating divorce or applause, I had not decided which.

The drive to Can Lau in Santa Margalida took about forty minutes, and by the time we pulled up to the stone finca, I had been thoroughly demoted from navigator to luggage porter. The property sat down a dusty track, all terracotta tiles and wooden beams, with a pool that glimmered like a promise. But it was not the villa that made the holiday. It was the people.

Our first morning, I wandered into the village for bread and immediately collided with Pep, a man in his seventies who was sweeping the same patch of pavement he had apparently been sweeping since 1987. He looked at my plastic bag from the supermarket with undisguised pity. "You want real bread," he declared, though it sounded more like an accusation. He marched me to a bakery three streets away, introduced me as "the English fool with the soft bread," and watched me eat an ensaimada with the intensity of a Michelin inspector. I have never chewed so carefully in my life.

Pep became our unofficial ambassador. Each dawn he would materialise by the villa's gate, usually with some unsolicited advice. "The pool man comes Tuesday," he announced one day, unprompted. "He is called Toni. He talks about football. Do not mention Barcelona." I filed this away like state secrets.

Toni the pool man did indeed come Tuesday, and true to prophecy, he talked about football. Specifically, he talked around football, circling the subject like a wary shark. "My cousin played once," he offered, testing me. I remembered Pep's warning and muttered something noncommittal about rain. Toni nodded approvingly and spent the next hour detailing his cousin's entire medical history. By the end I knew more about this stranger's knee cartilage than I knew about my own father's.

The woman who managed the property, Margalida herself, appeared on our third day with a bowl of figs and a expression that suggested she had already judged our laundry habits. She was sixtyish, formidable, and dressed perpetually as if about to attend a funeral or a revolution, I could never determine which. She inspected our cooking arrangements with the gravity of a health inspector, sighed at my attempt to make paella, and wordlessly took over. "You stir too much," she said, which felt like a metaphor for my entire life. We ate her version that evening on the terrace, and I experienced the closest thing to a religious conversion I am likely to manage.

There was also Jaume, who ran the tiny bar by the church and who refused to serve me coffee until I could pronounce "cafe amb llet" to his satisfaction. This took four days. On the fifth, he presented me with a sticker that read "Santa Margalida Survivor" in peeling letters. I stuck it on my phone, which somehow seemed fitting given its ignoble arrival.

By our final evening, Pep had upgraded me from "English fool" to "the English fool who listens." He brought over a bottle of hierbas, poured three glasses, and told us about his wife who had died twelve years prior. "She said I talked too much," he said, then talked for another hour without pause. The sun went down. The cicadas started up. Somewhere Toni was probably discussing someone's cousin.

We left the next morning, phone safely in pocket, head full of strangers who had become briefly, brilliantly ours. I still cannot make decent paella. But I can pronounce "cafe amb llet" well enough to break a man's heart, and I know better than to mention Barcelona to a pool engineer. Some holidays give you tan lines. This one gave me Pep, sweeping nothing in particular, waiting for the next fool with soft bread to wander past.