I have never been so grateful for air conditioning in my entire life, and I once spent a July afternoon trapped in a broken lift in Barcelona. The journey to Gran Alacant had been typical enough: budget flight, overpriced airport sandwich, rental car with a mystery stain on the passenger seat. But the real comedy began when I realised, somewhere past Alicante, that I had been driving for twenty minutes with my suitcase still sitting on the pavement outside the terminal. Cue a frantic U-turn, some creative Spanish hand gestures at a toll booth, and the slow realisation that holiday brain had officially set in before the holiday had even begun.

Arriving in late August, the heat hit me like opening an oven door to check on a roast. The estate agent had warned me about the summer temperatures, but there is a profound difference between reading "34 degrees" on a weather app and feeling your shirt become biologically inseparable from your back. The property itself, a tidy terraced house with a small pool and a terrace that looked out towards the salt flats, shimmered in the haze like a mirage. I half-expected to find it was merely a cardboard cutout propped up by a very committed local.

The seasonal timing coloured everything. The garden, which I later learned could be quite lush in spring, had retreated into a sensible drought mode. The lemon tree by the gate was valiantly hanging onto a few wrinkled fruit, as if to say, "I am trying, mate, but have you seen the sun?" The pool, though, was the undisputed hero of the hour. I spent my first evening floating on my back, watching swallows dart through a sky that shifted from bruised orange to deep violet, too hot even to consider cooking. Dinner became a procession of cold tapas: tinned mussels, bread with tomato, whatever could be assembled without approaching the hob.

What struck me most was how the neighbourhood itself had adapted to the season. The British-owned bars along the main strip operated on what I can only describe as lizard logic: shutters down until six, then sudden bustling life until midnight. My first morning, I woke at eight and wandered out for coffee to find the place practically deserted. A lone German cyclist passed me. A dog looked at me with evident pity. I felt like the last man at a party who had missed the memo about the revised start time.

There was a gentle melancholy to it too, which I had not expected. The summer season was clearly winding down. A few faded posters advertised fiestas that had already happened. The beach at Carabassi, a short drive away, still had plenty of visitors but the energy had shifted from peak frenzy to something more sustainable. Families with small children had largely vanished, replaced by couples and retired pairs who moved at a pace that matched the heat. I found myself adopting their rhythm almost unconsciously. Siesta became not laziness but simple survival. Meals stretched across hours. I read three books in a week, something I had not managed in years.

By my fourth day, I had stopped checking my phone for the weather forecast. What would be the point? It would be hot. It would be dry. The afternoon wind might kick up enough to make the terrace furniture rattle. This predictability became strangely comforting. I understood, in a small way, how people who live in such climates develop a different relationship with time itself. The year is not divided by temperature swings but by intensity of light, by which fruits appear at the market, by whether the tourists outnumber the locals or vice versa.

My final morning, I packed the car in the relative cool of seven o'clock, that magical hour when Gran Alacant briefly pretends it might be autumn. The lemon tree had dropped one last fruit overnight, which rolled against my shoe as I locked the gate. I left it there, a small offering to whoever arrived next, and drove back towards the airport with the windows down, already slightly brown from the sun and slightly wiser about my own capacity for travel-induced stupidity.