What's the magic going on with phalcon's paginator?

Question

Phalcon

The code:

$paginator = new PaginatorModel([
            'data'  => $images,
            'limit' => 12,
            'page'  => $page
        ]);

But I'm getting an exception here with this text: "The start page number is zero or less" it seems to say that $page is below or equal to zero.
I do var_dump($page); response: int(1)
How so?