I have never been so relieved to see a goat in my life. There I was, bumping down a dusty track somewhere between Cartagena and nowhere, convinced our hire car was about to deposit its sump on a rock the size of a football, when this magnificent horned beast wandered into the road and stared at us with the kind of judgmental expression I normally reserve for people who put pineapple on pizza. We had already missed the turning twice, once because I was arguing with the sat nav about whether "calle sin salida" really meant what I suspected it did, and once because I spotted a bakery in a village called La Union and convinced myself we needed emergency provisions. We did not need emergency provisions. We needed a functioning sense of direction.

The goat, it turned out, belonged to Paco, who materialised from behind an olive tree like some kind of agricultural genie. He was perhaps seventy, wearing a flat cap that had seen better decades and a pair of wellies held together with what looked like electrical tape and optimism. He spoke no English. I speak Spanish like a toddler with a head injury. Between us, we established that yes, this was the track to the Tallante, and yes, I was an idiot, and yes, he would lead us there in his tractor if we promised to tell "the English lady who runs the place" that he still had her pruning shears. This seemed a reasonable transaction.

The Tallante itself revealed itself gradually, a low-slung farmhouse surrounded by citrus groves and the kind of silence that makes you realise how much noise you normally carry around in your head. Paco's tractor rattled off with a wave that might have been friendly or might have been a warning, and we stood there with our suitcases and our dignity somewhat scattered across the campo.

The English lady who runs the place turned out to be Janet, who opened the door with a cup of tea already in her hand and the resigned expression of someone who has rescued many lost Britons from Paco's goat-related interventions. She was originally from Derbyshire, she explained, had moved here fifteen years ago after a divorce that she described only as "liberating, eventually," and now lived in what she called "the proper Spain" with her three dogs, two of whom were asleep on a sofa that had definitely started life indoors.

Janet gave us the tour with the enthusiasm of someone who genuinely still loves showing people around, pointing out the private pool that was currently hosting a family of frogs, the barbecue area where her neighbour Miguel had once set fire to an entire chicken, and the terrace where, she noted with some satisfaction, "you can see Africa on a clear day if you squint and have had enough wine." I have never been able to verify this claim, but I appreciate the ambition.

That evening, Miguel himself appeared with a bottle of his own wine and a story about the chicken fire that contradicted Janet's version in several important respects. He was perhaps sixty, built like a brick outbuilding, with hands that could probably crush walnuts and a laugh that started somewhere in his boots and worked its way up. He had lived in the next farmhouse since birth, he told us, except for two years in Barcelona "which was horrible, too many people, no space for a proper garden." He and Janet had an ongoing dispute about a lemon tree that straddled their property line, which they discussed with the affectionate hostility of siblings, complete with elaborate hand gestures and what I suspect was creative profanity that Janet declined to translate.

By the second evening, we had also met Concha, who delivered fresh bread and local gossip with equal dedication, and her grandson Antonio, a teenager who spoke excellent English from watching American television and who looked at the surrounding countryside with the melancholy of someone who dreams of fast internet and urban anonymity. He was learning to drive, he told us, because "here, if you cannot drive, you are basically a tree." I felt this deeply, given our earlier navigational humiliations.

What struck me, sitting on that terrace with a glass of Miguel's questionable wine and Janet's excellent tapas, was how completely these people had absorbed us into their orbit. There was no performance of hospitality, no tourist-facing veneer. Paco had literally herded us here like livestock. Miguel argued with Janet about citrus boundaries in front of us as if we had always been present. Concha remembered that I liked the seeded bread and brought extra without being asked. Antonio complained about his mobile data allowance as if I were a sympathetic uncle rather than a random foreigner who had failed to operate a sat nav.

I had arrived expecting a property, a transaction, a pleasant but essentially private experience. What I found was a tiny, accidental community, held together by lemon tree disputes and borrowed pruning shears and the shared understanding that anyone who ends up on that particular dusty track probably needs looking after. I still cannot find my way there without Paco's goat as a landmark, and I am genuinely unsure whether that says more about the place or about me.