I have never been so grateful for a sat-nav in my life, and I have never wanted to throw one out of a moving vehicle quite so much either. The journey from Valencia Airport to Peniscola had been going swimmingly until I decided I knew better than the robotic voice telling me to take the next exit. "Shortcut," I muttered, turning down what Google Maps optimistically labelled a road. It was, in fact, a dirt track belonging to an orange farmer who watched my little hire car bounce past with the kind of expression usually reserved for people who have just seen a goat attempting to operate a tractor.

Three wrong turns and one extremely sheepish reverse past a flock of unimpressed sheep later, I arrived at the property complex in Peniscola proper. The apartment block sat there looking perfectly sensible and welcoming, which somehow made my agricultural detour feel even more ridiculous. I was still laughing at myself when I pulled into the car park, and that is when I met Pilar.

She was seventy if she was a day, wearing a housecoat that could only be described as aggressively floral, and she was watering a single potted plant with the focused intensity of a heart surgeon. "You are the English," she announced, not a question. "I heard you coming from three kilometres. That is not a car for the campo." I admitted my navigational shame, and she let out a bark of laughter that startled a nearby pigeon. "My husband Manuel once drove to Barcelona by mistake trying to reach the supermarket. Come, I show you the pool."

Manuel, it transpired, was Pilar's polar opposite. Where she was all sharp gestures and sharper observations, he was a small man who moved at the pace of warm honey and spoke in measured ruminations that frequently wandered off into stories about his time as a fisherman. I encountered him that evening on the communal terrace, attempting to work the barbecue with the air of someone defusing a bomb. "In 1974," he said, as if continuing a conversation we had been having for hours, "I caught a fish this big." He held his hands approximately four feet apart. Pilar, passing with a tray of patatas bravas, snorted. "It was this big," she said, holding her thumb and forefinger an inch apart, not breaking stride.

The pool area became my morning headquarters, not for swimming but for people-watching and being gradually absorbed into the complex's social fabric. There was young Marco, Pilar and Manuel's grandson, who visited every afternoon with the energy of a caffeinated squirrel and attempted to teach me Valencian phrases that Pilar later informed me were largely invented. "He told you that means 'good morning'? It means 'my uncle has a wooden leg.' He is a terrible child. I am very proud."

By day three I had been recruited into what Pilar termed "the committee," which appeared to have no actual purpose beyond gathering on plastic loungers to pass judgment on passersby and share whatever someone had baked. A woman called Beatriz brought almond cake that she claimed was her grandmother's recipe, though Pilar whispered that Beatriz's grandmother had been famously unable to boil water. "But we eat it," Pilar said, shrugging. "What else would we do? Tell her? She would bring worse cake to punish us."

The mishap that defined my arrival, that ridiculous dirt track and the orange farmer's withering stare, became my currency. Manuel would shake his head slowly every time it came up, which was often, because Pilar brought it up constantly. "Tell the one about the sheep," she would command whenever anyone new appeared, and I would perform my own foolishness like a party piece. There was something unexpectedly freeing about being the village idiot, the temporary Englishman who could not follow simple directions.

On my final morning, Manuel pressed a bag of oranges into my hands. From the actual farmer, he explained, who had asked after me. Pilar hugged me with surprising ferocity and said I drove like a blind donkey but I was welcome back anytime. I left the sat-nav firmly on, took the correct exit, and found myself genuinely sad to be leaving people I had known for barely a week. Some places you visit for the weather or the scenery. I came for a cheap apartment near the coast and found myself adopted by a committee of strangers who turned my most embarrassing moment into my best story. I still do not know if Marco's Valencian lessons were genuine, and I absolutely never corrected Beatriz about her grandmother's baking. Some mysteries are better left intact.