I have never been a natural navigator, which is how I ended up circling the same roundabout near Polop three times before realising my hire car's sat nav had quietly given up on me entirely. The journey from Valencia Airport had been straightforward enough, a pleasant cruise down the AP-7 with orange groves flashing past and the occasional glimpse of the Mediterranean winking through the hills. Then I hit the winding roads inland, and my technological companion decided I was on my own.

The mishap that truly defined my arrival, though, happened when I finally spotted what I thought was my turning. I swung the car left with triumphant enthusiasm, only to discover I had committed myself to a steep farm track intended for something with considerably more ground clearance than a Fiat 500. There I was, bumping along like a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel, until a local farmer appeared from nowhere and simply pointed back the way I had come, his expression suggesting he had witnessed this exact scene approximately four thousand times before. I reversed with what dignity I could muster, which was none whatsoever.

When I did locate the property, tucked among pine trees with the Sierra de Bernia rising behind it, the relief was almost embarrassing. I had booked a villa in this corner of the Marina Alta partly for the peace, partly because I liked the sound of a town whose name resembled a cheerful sneeze. What I had not expected was how immediately the place would feel like somewhere I had stumbled upon rather than planned. The key was in a lockbox, the instructions slightly smudged, and I spent a good five minutes trying to open what turned out to be the garden shed before finding the actual front door. This set the tone rather beautifully.

My first morning, still jet-lagged and operating on what I can only describe as holiday brain, I set out for what I believed was a straightforward walk to Polop town centre. I took a wrong turn within approximately ninety seconds. The path narrowed, became cobbled, then became something between a path and a dry stream bed. I should have turned back. Instead, I pressed on through terraced hillsides where almond trees clung to slopes that seemed to defy gravity. The silence was broken only by the occasional goat bell and my own increasingly laboured breathing.

Then the path opened without warning onto a tiny plaza I could never have found deliberately. A single bar occupied one corner, three elderly men occupied plastic chairs outside it, and a fountain trickled into a stone basin that looked older than most countries. I ordered a cafe solo from a woman who did not appear surprised to see a sweaty Englishman materialise from the undergrowth. We established through gestures and my terrible Spanish that I had discovered the old washing place, where women once beat their laundry against the stones. She pointed upward, and I finally understood where I was in relation to everywhere else, which was essentially nowhere I had intended to be.

That accidental discovery became the pattern of my stay. I found a bakery in a neighbouring village by following my nose down an alley that looked like a dead end. I stumbled across a market selling nothing but honey and handmade soaps because I misread a sign for the supermarket. I spent an afternoon at a hermitage perched above the town, reached by a staircase I had mistaken for a private driveway, where the view stretched from the mountains to the sea in a panorama that no guidebook had prepared me for.

There is something particular about getting lost in a place like this. The hills fold in on themselves, the old paths predate any sensible mapping, and the locals navigate by landmarks that mean nothing to an outsider. I began to understand that my hopeless sense of direction was not a failing but a kind of gift, if I accepted it. Each wrong turn delivered something I would not have thought to search for: a family-run bodega where the owner insisted I taste his mistela, a hidden garden of ancient olive trees, a viewpoint where I sat for an hour watching swallows dive through the evening light.

By my final day, I had stopped even pretending to plan. I drove until the roads became too narrow, then walked until the paths became too vague, then simply stopped wherever looked interesting. I found myself in a tiny hamlet where an old woman was harvesting wild fennel from the verge, and she showed me how to identify the tender young fronds, communicating through demonstration what words could not manage. I left with a paper bag of her gift and no name for the place I had been.

I never did learn to navigate properly. My phone remained stubbornly convinced that I was permanently located in a field approximately two hundred metres from my actual position. The farmer who had watched my inaugural wrong turn waved cheerfully whenever I passed, presumably checking for fresh entertainment. But I arrived home with the peculiar satisfaction of someone who had not seen the expected sights and was profoundly glad of it. Some places reward intention, but Polop, I think, prefers the wanderer who comes without expectations, the one who turns left by mistake and finds something that could not have been found any other way.