I have never been so relieved to see a swimming pool in my entire life, and that includes the time I nearly fell into the fountain at Trafalgar Square after a Christmas party. The drive from Palma airport to Sa Rapita had been straightforward enough, but I had made the classic April error of assuming Majorca would be blazing sunshine from the moment I stepped off the plane. I was wearing a linen shirt that I now realised was essentially a sophisticated way of being cold and slightly damp at the same time.

The spring weather had been doing that thing where it cannot quite commit. One minute the hire car was being battered by a proper downpour near Llucmajor, the next the clouds would part and I would be squinting like a mole in a torch factory. By the time I pulled up at Oasis D'es Trenc, I had experienced what felt like three seasons in forty minutes, and my first impression of the place was filtered through a windscreen still dotted with rain that the wipers had given up on.

Stepping out of the car, the air smelled of wet earth and something else, something I could not place until later when I noticed the lemon trees in the garden. That sharp, clean scent cut through the humidity in a way that made me forgive the weather entirely. The villa sat there looking thoroughly unbothered by the drizzle, all white walls and terracotta roof tiles, the sort of place that has seen countless Aprils come and go and knows better than to make a fuss.

The key was in the lockbox, which I fumbled with for an embarrassing length of time because my fingers had gone that particular shade of cold where they stop doing what you tell them. Inside, the tiled floors were cool underfoot in a way that felt glorious after the journey, though I suspected by August I would be craving the very warmth I was now escaping. That is the thing about seasonal travel, I thought, as I dumped my bag and opened every door I could find like someone conducting an informal breeze audit. You are always slightly out of sync with the place you are visiting, always borrowing someone else's weather.

The covered terrace became my immediate refuge. I sat there with a cup of tea made with a kettle I had to locate through three cupboards, watching the clouds perform their slow theatre across the sky. The garden furniture was still stacked in one corner, not yet fully deployed for the summer rush, and there was something quietly honest about that. The villa was not pretending to be in peak season. It was offering me April exactly as April is here, which turned out to be rather wonderful once I stopped expecting June.

By late afternoon the sun had properly arrived, and I wandered down to the pool area where the water looked almost too inviting after my earlier shivering. I did not swim, not yet, the air still carrying that edge that makes you hesitate. Instead I sat on the edge with my feet in, feeling the temperature gradient between surface and depth, and watched the light change over the low stone wall toward Es Trenc beach in the distance. The salt flats nearby glinted in the shifting sun, that particular silvery-white that seems to belong to this stretch of coast alone.

Evening brought a proper chill, and I found myself grateful for the villa's heating, something I had not imagined packing for. I cooked a simple dinner from supplies picked up at the Eroski in Sa Rapita town, the sort of shop where you end up with excellent cheese and bread and not much else because the Spanish do those things so well you stop needing anything complicated. Eating on that terrace, wrapped in a blanket I had found in a cupboard, I watched the sky fade through every shade of apricot and grey, the clouds still restless, still undecided.

It struck me then that I had spent years chasing perfect weather, the guaranteed blue skies of high summer, and had missed this entirely. The uncertainty of April in Majorca, the way the day keeps you guessing, makes you notice things you would otherwise sleep through in the heat. The villa felt like a partner in this rather than a backdrop, its spaces designed for exactly this in-between living, the covered areas and the open ones, the choice of sun or shade always available.

I fell asleep that night to the sound of rain returning, pattering against terracotta with a rhythm I would not have heard in the sealed air-conditioning of peak season, and woke to mist over the garden and birds making a tremendous fuss about it. The pool had that still, reflective quality that only cool mornings give it, and I finally swam, gasping slightly at first, then settling into something that felt like the whole point of being here after all. Not escape, exactly, but participation. The season and I were figuring each other out, and Oasis D'es Trenc was the perfect place to let that happen slowly, without rushing toward a summer that would arrive in its own good time whether I hurried it or not.