I should have known the holiday was going to be eventful when I tried to unlock the wrong villa with someone else's key code, standing there in the midday sun like a confused burglar while an alarm I'd accidentally triggered wailed across the valley. The actual owner of that particular property, a sun-leathered German chap called Dieter, emerged from his terrace with a glass of what looked like very strong sangria and simply raised an eyebrow. "Nein," he said, with the weariness of a man who had seen this before. I mumbled apologies in three languages, none of them German, and scurried back down the lane to find Son Pujol D'andratx, which turned out to be mercifully unalarmed and genuinely mine for the week.

The journey from Palma had already set the tone. I'd collected the hire car, a dented Fiat that smelled faintly of fish and optimism, and promptly got myself wedged in a roundabout near Port d'Andratx behind a tractor carrying what appeared to be an entire lemon grove. The driver, an ancient Mallorcan with a face like a walnut, caught my eye in his rearview mirror and simply laughed, a proper belly laugh, as if my predicament was the finest entertainment he'd had all month. I found myself laughing too, stuck there in the heat, realising that this was probably not a place that rewarded rushing.

Arriving at the villa proper felt like stepping into someone else's excellent life. The stone facade was that particular honey colour you only seem to get in the Balearics, and the pool glimmered with the smug blue of water that knows it is photographed often. But it was the people who made the place, starting with Pep, the local caretaker, who materialised from behind an olive tree with the silent grace of a man who had been watching my earlier key fumble from a distance. He spoke rapid Mallorcan Spanish with the occasional English word thrown in like a lifeline, and within ten minutes had explained the boiler, the bins, the best place to buy sobrasada, and his entire philosophy regarding British tourists, which boiled down to "too much sunscreen, not enough patience."

That evening I walked down to Andratx village, still slightly dazed from travel and embarrassment, and found myself in a tiny bar where the barman, Toni, refused to let me order in Spanish. "You speak like a machine," he said, not unkindly, and proceeded to teach me the proper Mallorcan way to ask for a beer, which apparently involved several sounds I could not reliably reproduce. An elderly woman at the corner table, who introduced herself as Margalida and claimed to be ninety-three though she looked about seventy, insisted I try her grandson's ensaimadas, which she just happened to have in a paper bag. We sat there as the light faded, her telling me about the village before the tourists came, before the second homes and the fancy restaurants, when everyone knew whose goat had wandered where and nobody locked anything, or at least not properly.

I thought about Dieter and his sangria, and the walnut-faced farmer, and Pep watching from behind his olive tree, and realised that my holiday mishap had been a sort of accidental introduction to a place that runs on human connection rather than efficiency. Son Pujol D'andratx was lovely, certainly, with its terraces and its views and its properly functioning key code, but it was the peculiar generosity of strangers that made me feel, for the first time that day, like I had actually arrived somewhere worth being.