I should have known the holiday was going to be interesting when I packed my partner's passport instead of my own. There we were, three hours into the drive from Alicante airport, me white-knuckling the steering wheel of our hire car through the Spanish countryside, when I reached for my documents at a petrol station and found a photo of my other half grinning back at me. Cue twenty minutes of frantic rummaging, some creative language, and the dawning realisation that my passport was probably still sitting on the kitchen table in Leeds. Miraculously, I had shoved my driving licence into the wrong folder, so we pressed on, me muttering about how this was definitely going to be a story we'd laugh about later. Spoiler: we are still not laughing about it.

The approach to San Miguel de Salinas did something to settle my nerves, though. You come over this rise and suddenly the salt lakes spread out below you, pinkish and strange in the afternoon light, with the town sitting perched above them like it has been there forever and does not particularly care whether you have arrived or not. That is the thing about this corner of Valencia - it does not perform for tourists. It just gets on with being itself.

We found our holiday home down one of those narrow lanes that make you question every life choice that led you to rent a car with wing mirrors. The property sat there, all whitewashed walls and terracotta, with a pool that caught the last of the sun and threw it back at us like a challenge. I stood in the courtyard, still clutching the wrong passport, and felt something shift. The mishap did not matter. We were here.

The next morning, determined to make up for my packing disaster, I suggested we "just wander" into town without a map. My partner gave me that look, the one that says she remembers the Athens incident of 2019, but she humoured me. We took a left where we should have gone right, ended up on a dirt track between lemon groves, and stumbled upon a tiny bar where an old man was roasting almonds over an open drum. He did not speak English. We do not speak Spanish with any competence. We spent twenty minutes pointing, smiling, and eventually walking away with paper cones of warm nuts and two coffees that tasted of woodsmoke and something indefinably local. It was the best breakfast of the holiday.

That set the pattern. We got lost deliberately after that, if I am honest. Down near the salt flats we took a wrong turn and found a family selling honey from their garage, the jars lined up on a folding table with handwritten labels. In the town itself, we ducked through an archway looking for a shortcut and discovered a courtyard where women were hanging washing and chatting across balconies, utterly unbothered by two confused Brits blinking in their sunshine. Someone directed us to a bakery through a series of gestures that involved significant arm movements, and we emerged with ensaimadas still warm, eating them on a bench in a plaza that did not appear in any guidebook I have since consulted.

There was a moment, sitting on that bench, flaky pastry everywhere, when I caught myself thinking about how much of my usual life is spent optimising, planning, ensuring everything fits into its proper slot. The passport mix-up had forced a kind of surrender. The getting lost had become the point. I am not going to claim some profound transformation - I still checked my documents three times before our flight home - but something loosened in me that week.

The property itself became our base for these little expeditions. We would swim in the morning, make some vague gesture toward a destination, and then see what found us instead. An olive oil cooperative run by a woman whose grandfather started the press. A viewpoint over the lagoons where flamingos stood in the shallows like pink punctuation marks. A tiny restaurant in a village I still cannot name where the owner brought us dishes we had not ordered and watched us eat them with the satisfaction of an artist at a private viewing.

I think that is what San Miguel de Salinas gave us that no amount of research could have. The place rewards the wandering, the accidental, the slightly incompetent traveller who packed the wrong passport and does not mind admitting it. We went looking for a holiday and found something more like a reminder - that not everything needs to be correct to be worthwhile, that sometimes the wrong turn delivers you exactly where you needed to be.