Leaving Oxford, even for a short holiday, highlights its strengths as a place to live and work. Our temperate climate and compact city makes for relatively easy living, whatever the season.

Watching the griffin vultures circle above the flower-filled pastures of the Spanish Pyrenees, the whole area is preparing for the winter holiday season.

Shops now shut, their windows barred and metal cased will open again in a few weeks. Restaurants and bars, now dark, and full of empty tables will fill with seasonal visitors.

While the chairlifts stand idle, the Telecabina cable car is taking a smattering of tourists in shorts and T-shirts up the mountainside, but in only a matter of weeks, they will be heading for the ski slopes, dressed to withstand the bitter cold.

On the high summer pastures, cream Charolais beef cattle are grazing the rich grass. You can hear them above you, behind bushes and trees, long before you come across an herd – their large metal bells clanking incessantly as they feed, hanging around their necks from sturdy leather collars. The bulls are huge – magnificent, and freely ranging among the cows and calves. A brief summer’s idyll on the slopes before the autumn rains.

Horses too – their chestnut coats gleaming in the sunshine and thick, pale manes and tails, flicking to disperse the biting persistence of horse flies – roam the mountain pastures, their foals close by their round-bellied dams, the stallions attentive and amorous.

On the lower slopes, black and white Friesian cows cluster under ancient holm oaks and chestnuts, waiting for milking, while in the cool of the woods, nightingales sing. Beside the leaf littered paths, recently hatched flying termites, emerge from grass pile nests. Stepping on the huge black ants in sandals is a mistake you only make once. Summer is just a brief interlude here, of swimming in cold, clear lakes, picnics, mountain biking and hiking. But everywhere are warnings of ice, snow, slippery slopes and hairpin bends. Huge snow machines stand ready for the first fall of winter.

As yet, I haven’t seen a single bus – yet villages are hours on foot apart, and some of the paths between them dauntingly steep and – especially in the thin mountain air which taxes you, even as you step out your apartment, to walk up the hill to the nearest hotel with an internet connection.

Imagine walking with heavy shopping up vertical streets – and those pavements slippery underfoot after summer cloudbursts and thunderstorms. Winter is harsher. Instead of just popping out to your neighbours, having to wait for roads to be cleared, and when you run out of sugar – well, it’s several miles to the nearest shop.

We drove nearly 60 miles through Southern France without seeing a petrol station and with only five miles left in the tank, came across two stations – both closed before 6pm. We slid into one on the Spanish Border with a few drops to spare.

It’s beautiful here – but both the landscape and seasons pose daily challenges. Respect for the locals, and admiration for the setting – but appreciation like none other when you’re away from it, for Oxford’s excellent all year facilities and effective communications.