Icod de los Vinos Tenerife: A Comedy of Arrivals

The sat nav had been threatening to quit on us since Santa Cruz, so when it finally packed in entirely at a roundabout just outside Icod de los Vinos, I wasn't even surprised. What did surprise me was my own spectacular overreaction. Rather than pull over like a normal person, I carried on round the roundabout three times, growing increasingly frantic, while my partner sat there making increasingly unhelpful comments about "going for another lap." By the fourth circuit, a chap in a white van had stopped to watch. He was actually laughing. I wound down the window, red-faced, and he strolled over as casually as if this happened every Tuesday.

"You're looking for the holiday lets," he said. Not a question. Statement of fact. This was Guillermo, who turned out to live three doors down from our place and had apparently spotted our hire car's distinctive dent from a minor parking incident in Puerto de la Cruz. Word travels fast in Icod. He hopped in the passenger seat without invitation, directed us through two absurdly narrow lanes that I'd never have found alone, and spent the entire journey explaining that he'd once done five laps of the same roundabout after a particularly long lunch at his cousin's restaurant.

The property itself sat tucked into a quiet residential street, all whitewashed walls and wooden shutters that had seen better decades. Guillermo introduced us to Maria, the neighbour from across the way, who'd been sweeping her doorstep for what appeared to be several hours purely to observe our arrival. She spoke no English and I speak barely any Spanish beyond "una cerveza, por favor," yet we managed a twenty-minute conversation about the weather, her grandson in Madrid, and something involving goats that I didn't fully grasp but nodded along to enthusiastically. She pressed two enormous avocados into my hands, grown in her own garden, and told me through gestures that I'd need them for breakfast. She was absolutely right.

Our key holder, a taciturn fellow called Ernesto, arrived shortly after. He moved with the unhurried pace of a man who'd never once checked a watch in his life. Every sentence came with a philosophical pause, as if each thought needed proper consideration before release. He showed us the boiler, the fuse box, the tricky back door that needed "a little talking to," and spent fully ten minutes explaining why the Wi-Fi router preferred not to work during thunderstorms. "It has personality," he said, deadpan. "Respect it." I couldn't tell if he was joking until he winked, which took approximately four seconds to complete.

By evening, we'd met half the street without leaving our front door. A boy called Tomas delivered bread from his grandmother's kitchen, accepting payment with the solemnity of a bank manager. An elderly gentleman whose name I never caught simply appeared in our garden, pointed at our lemon tree, made an approving noise, and vanished. I later learned this was his standard greeting for all new arrivals; Maria had told him we were coming.

Sitting on the terrace that first night, avocado still on the counter, I found myself reflecting on how utterly different this was from my usual holiday approach. Normally I'd have researched restaurants, plotted day trips, treated relaxation like something to schedule. Here, within hours, the rhythm of the place had already slowed me down. Guillermo had reappeared with a bottle of local wine, "to welcome the roundabout people." We drank it watching the light fade over the valley, and I realised I'd spent an entire afternoon doing precisely nothing productive, yet felt more genuinely on holiday than I had in years.

The sat nav never did recover. I left it in the glove box as a reminder that sometimes getting properly lost is exactly the point.