I have never been so grateful for a sat nav's robotic patience as I was driving into La Manga del Mar Menor last Tuesday. Three hours of motorway from Alicante had left me convinced I was a competent driver, right up until I followed what I thought was a shortcut through Cabo de Palos and found myself in a car park that definitely, absolutely, was not my apartment complex. I sat there for a good five minutes arguing with the sat nav woman, who kept insisting I perform a U-turn in a space roughly the width of a supermarket trolley. A man walking his dog paused to watch this performance. I waved cheerfully. He did not wave back. I decided this was character building.

The actual property, when I finally found it, sat on that extraordinary strip of land between the Mar Menor and the Mediterranean, and I stepped out of the car already slightly defeated by my own incompetence. This is when I met Paco, who appeared from nowhere to inform me I had parked in his usual spot. He said this not with annoyance but with the resigned air of a man who had watched countless holidaymakers make exactly this error. He was seventy if he was a day, wearing a vest that had seen better decades, and he spoke English with the peculiar cadence of someone who had learned it entirely from watching football commentary on television. "You are English," he announced. "You drive like the English." I wanted to protest, but I had literally just been lost in a car park for fifteen minutes, so I offered him a beer from the warm six-pack rolling around my passenger footwell instead. He accepted this as fair tribute.

Paco walked me to reception, which was not really reception at all but a small table near the pool where a woman called Concha was doing a crossword and pretending not to notice new arrivals. She looked up when Paco announced me as "the lost English," marked something in her puzzle, and handed me a key without asking my name. "Paco knows everyone," she said, by way of explanation. "If he says you are the lost English, you are the lost English." I felt simultaneously welcomed and mildly insulted, which I have since learned is the default emotional state of being a British tourist in Spain.

The apartment itself was simple and clean, with a balcony overlooking the pool where three children were engaged in what appeared to be an elaborate water-based argument. Their mother, a woman from Madrid called Lourdes, waved at me with the desperate enthusiasm of someone who had been sole adult supervisor for too many consecutive hours. We spoke for twenty minutes while I unpacked absolutely nothing. She told me about the best place for calamares, the man who sold melons from the back of his van, and her theory that the Mar Menor was "psychologically different" from the Mediterranean because it was warmer and saltier and made people behave slightly more foolishly. "You will see," she said, with the confidence of prophecy.

That evening I walked to the local shops, still disoriented by the flat light off the lagoon, and found a small supermarket run by a brothers who looked identical but were apparently not related at all. The one on the till, who introduced himself as Juan, took one look at my purchases - bread, terrible wine, and a sun hat I immediately regretted - and asked if I was the man Paco had found in his parking spot. News travels fast in communities built on narrow strips of land. I admitted my guilt. Juan gave me a discount on the wine, which he described as "punishment for Paco's suffering," and told me to come back tomorrow when his brother would be working and I could confuse them both by telling the story again.

I lay awake that first night with the balcony door open, listening to the strange quiet of a place where the sea sits on both sides but behaves differently on each. Somewhere in the darkness, I could hear Paco's television playing what sounded like a very enthusiastic Spanish commentary on a football match I did not understand. I thought about Lourdes and her theory about the Mar Menor making people foolish, and I thought about how I had already told three strangers about getting lost in a car park, and how each of them had found this more interesting than embarrassing. There is something about arriving somewhere new that strips away the performance of competence we all maintain at home, and something about this particular strip of land that seems to reward that stripping away with beer discounts and unsolicited melon recommendations.

The next morning I woke early and walked down to the shore of the Mar Menor, where the water was indeed warmer and saltier and the light was already doing something strange to my sense of proportion. An old woman was swimming with a kind of determined breaststroke that suggested she had been doing this every morning since before I was born. She nodded at me as she passed. I nodded back. Neither of us spoke, but I felt I had passed some kind of test, or perhaps simply been noted and filed away for future reference by the collective memory of the place.

I still had the terrible wine, and the sun hat I would grow to love despite its ridiculousness, and a growing suspicion that I was going to tell everyone about that car park for the entire duration of my stay, and that they were all going to enjoy it more than I strictly deserved.