The thing about driving on the wrong side of the road in a hire car that smells faintly of pine air freshener and regret is that you convince yourself you've got it sorted. I'd been doing brilliantly all the way from Palma airport, roundabouts and everything, right up until I turned into what I thought was the lane to Son Sans in Santanyi and found myself nose-to-nose with a tractor the size of a small bungalow. The farmer, a wiry chap called Tomeu with eyebrows like two caterpillars having an argument, didn't even look surprised. He just climbed down, knocked on my window, and said in perfect English, "First time?" I admitted it was. He laughed so hard his dog started barking, then spent ten minutes reversing both our vehicles while explaining that I'd missed the turning by roughly half a mile and that Germans do this all the time, so I shouldn't feel special.

I finally found the right track, if you can call a dusty path bordered by dry stone walls and suspicious goats a track. The villa itself sat among olive trees with that particular honey-coloured light you only seem to get in Majorca, all shuttered windows and terracotta roof tiles. I was still flustered from the tractor incident when I met Margalida, who manages the property. She appeared from behind a lemon tree with a pair of secateurs and an expression that suggested she'd been watching my arrival with some amusement. "Tomeu rang me," she said, no preamble. "He said the Englishwoman with the terrible reversing is here." I decided to own it. We got on famously after that.

Margalida is one of those people who contains multitudes. Within an hour she'd told me about her granddaughter's wedding in Palma, explained why the pool filter was making that particular whirring noise, and delivered a lengthy opinion on British tourists who complain about the heat. "They come here for sun, then they want to know where the air conditioning is. In my mother's house we had a fan. One fan. For eleven people." She said this not with bitterness but with the satisfaction of someone who has witnessed human folly and found it nourishing.

The next morning I walked down to the village proper, partly to buy bread and partly to escape Margalida's nephew Toni, who had arrived to fix a shutter and wanted to discuss Brexit in detail. In the square I found Jaume, who runs a tiny bar where the coffee costs less than the time it takes to drink it. He speaks approximately fifteen words of English, all of them football-related, so our conversation became an elaborate charade involving gestures, drawings on napkins, and at one point a demonstration of how to peel an orange that drew a small crowd of regulars. An elderly man called Pere, who I later learned hasn't spoken to his brother since 1987 over something involving a borrowed ladder, insisted on translating despite not understanding me any better than Jaume did. The three of us spent twenty minutes discussing what I thought was local history but turned out, I eventually gathered, to be Jaume's opinion on Manchester United's defensive strategy circa 1999.

Back at Son Sans that evening, Margalida appeared with a bowl of figs from her own garden and stayed to watch the sunset. She told me about growing up in Santanyi when the road to Palma was a full day's journey, about her husband who built their house with his own hands, about the Swedish couple who'd stayed here last summer and tried to barbecue octopus. "The smoke alarm," she said, with the air of someone describing a natural disaster, "we could hear it in the village." She left me with the figs and the instruction to wake early tomorrow because Tomeu was bringing his sheep past the property and I'd want to see it, preferably from a stationary vehicle.

I sat by the pool as the light faded, eating figs and listening to the distant sound of someone, somewhere, probably explaining something to a confused tourist. Majorca, I was learning, is not really about the beaches or the cathedrals or whatever the guidebooks promise. It is about Margalida and her secateurs, about Tomeu's eyebrows, about Jaume's orange-peeling philosophy. I had come for a quiet week in the sun and found myself collected by strangers like a stray cat, slightly bedraggled, clearly in need of direction, and unexpectedly welcome. The sheep, apparently, would be by at half six. I set my alarm, checked the hire car was pointing the right direction, and decided that getting lost might be the whole point.