I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav in my entire life, and I say that as someone who once drove the wrong way round a roundabout in Milton Keynes. The journey from Murcia airport to La Manga del Mar Menor had seemed straightforward enough on paper, but somewhere between the hire car pickup and my first Spanish roundabout, I managed to take what I can only describe as the scenic route through every industrial estate in southeastern Spain. Forty-five minutes of increasingly frantic U-turns later, I finally spotted the sign for La Manga Club and nearly wept with relief.

It was late October when I arrived, and that turned out to be the making of the whole trip. The summer crowds had long since vanished, leaving behind a strange, lovely stillness that I had not expected at all. I had packed for blazing heat because, well, Spain, and stood at the boot of my car in a thin cotton shirt while a surprisingly brisk sea breeze reminded me that autumn does actually exist in the Mediterranean. The property itself, a ground-floor apartment with its own small terrace, sat tucked among pine trees that were already dropping needles in golden drifts across the path. I later learned that the complex pools had closed for the season, which initially felt like a blow, but the quiet that came with that closure was something else entirely.

My first morning, I woke to a peculiar orange light filtering through the shutters. Stepping outside with a cup of tea that I had made with the wrong sort of milk because I had panicked in the supermarket, I found the Mar Menor flat as glass and the sky doing that extraordinary autumn thing where low sun turns everything theatrical and golden. A man was fishing from the shore maybe fifty metres away, his silhouette perfectly still. We nodded at each other like people do when they meet at odd hours, two early risers in a world still asleep.

The temperature sat in the low twenties most days, warm enough to sit outside without a jacket by midday but cool enough that you actually wanted to walk rather than lie still and roast. I took to wandering the coastal path that runs behind the properties, where the vegetation had that end-of-season shagginess, all dried seed heads and browning grasses. A local dog walker became my regular passing acquaintance; we never progressed beyond "hola" and gestures about the weather, but there was something comforting in the repetition.

The evenings drew in quickly, which I had not anticipated. By half six the light was fading, and I found myself cooking earlier than I would at home, making heavy use of the small kitchen and the excellent local vegetables that still appeared at a nearby market despite the season. Tomatoes that actually tasted of something, peppers with proper heat to them. I ate on the terrace with a blanket over my knees like an old man, watching the sky shift through versions of pink and orange that seemed almost excessive, as if Spain was showing off because it knew I was watching.

There was a swimming beach, Playa del Estacio, barely ten minutes' walk away, and I did swim once, on a day when the sun emerged properly and the water felt briefly tolerable. A Spanish family watched me from the shore with what I can only describe as polite concern. I emerged shivering but triumphant, and they applauded, which I choose to believe was genuine encouragement rather than irony.

What struck me most, I think, was how the season stripped everything back to its essentials. No fighting for restaurant tables, no queueing for anything, no pressure to be constantly doing. The golf courses nearby, usually packed I am told, had that satisfying autumnal look of well-tended grass without the crowds. I walked one early morning and saw a single player in the distance, his white ball arcing against a pale sky.

By my final day, the weather had turned properly, a storm blowing in from the sea that sent me scurrying to pull in the terrace furniture. I stood at the window with my wrong-milk tea and watched the Mar Menor churn grey and restless, suddenly looking like a completely different place from the mirror-calm water of my arrival. It felt fitting, somehow, that it should end this way, with nature reminding me that even mild Mediterranean climates have their moods, their shifts, their reasons for visiting at one time rather than another.

I left the following morning in darkness, the sat-nav finding its way back to the airport without my intervention, almost as if it felt sorry for me after our first encounter. Somewhere behind me, the sun was rising over a coastline that would soon empty further still, waiting out the winter before the summer crowds returned to claim it again. I rather liked that I had seen it in between, in that pause between the heat and the cold, when a place becomes briefly and beautifully itself.