Every serious golfer has at least one dream course they would drop everything to play tomorrow.
Maybe it’s the cliffs of Pebble Beach, the history of St Andrews, or the impossible beauty of Augusta National. These are the courses golfers talk about for decades, save for for years, and remember forever after just one round. Some will test every part of your game, while others will simply leave you standing on the fairway in disbelief.
Here are 60 bucket-list golf courses that belong on every golfer’s lifetime wish list.
P.S. They’re ranked – Number 1 at the end is our top pick! (And – no, it’s not St Andrews).
60. Furnace Creek Golf Course (California, USA)
Designer: Lawrence Hughes (1927) | Desert | Par 70 | Public daily-fee | Green fee ~$80
Two hundred and fourteen feet below sea level, in the middle of Death Valley, sits a golf course. Yes, really.
Furnace Creek is the lowest course on earth, and you don’t play it for the architecture — it’s a tidy 1927 desert layout. You play it for the bragging rights.
Summer temperatures hit 120 degrees. Coyotes wander the fairways. Bring more water than you think you need. Then bring more.
59. Celtic Manor Resort – Twenty Ten Course (Wales, UK)
Designer: Ross McMurray (2007) | Parkland | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~£195
Built from scratch for one specific weekend in October 2010, this is the only course in golf history designed to host a Ryder Cup — the biennial team match between America and Europe, and the loudest, most emotional event in the sport.
Welsh hillsides, mature trees, a couple of muscular par 5s. The walk down the final hole is where Europe sealed the win that year.
Goosebumps come standard.
58. The Belfry – Brabazon Course (England, UK)
Designer: Peter Alliss & Dave Thomas (1977) | Parkland | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~£195
Seve Ballesteros once drove a green on a long par 4 here, over water, when nobody thought it was possible. Golfers have been trying to copy him ever since.
The Belfry has hosted four Ryder Cups — more than any other course on earth — and the 10th hole, Seve’s hole, is one of the most-copied designs in modern golf.
The rest is honest English parkland. You come for the history.
57. Aphrodite Hills (Cyprus)
Designer: Cabell Robinson (2002) | Clifftop Mediterranean | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~€140
The Mediterranean is so blue here it almost looks fake.
Aphrodite Hills sits on the limestone cliffs of southern Cyprus, with one famous par 3 that asks you to hit over a deep canyon — the kind of shot that takes more nerve than skill.
The architecture is solid, but the real draw is the warm-weather golf, the sea breeze, and the local wine list waiting on the patio afterward.
56. Domaine de Taulane (France)
Designer: Gary Player (1992) | Mountain parkland | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~€120
Tucked into the foothills of Provence, with towering pines and snow-capped Alps in the distance, this is golf that feels like a long French lunch.
The fairways are empty most days, the food at the restaurant is — predictably, unapologetically — superb, and it makes a perfect detour between Nice and the coast.
Quiet, polished, deeply French. Bring the spouse. Bring an appetite.
55. Sandy Lane Golf Course (Barbados)
Designer: Tom Fazio (2002) | Tropical | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$370
Tiger Woods got married here. So you know the kind of place we’re talking about.
Sandy Lane is the flagship resort on Barbados’s west coast, designed by one of the most expensive architects in America. The grass is impossibly green for the climate, the views are postcard, and the green fee will leave a real mark on your credit card.
Worth doing once, especially if someone else is paying.
54. Reynolds Lake Oconee – The Oconee Course (Georgia, USA)
Designer: Rees Jones (2002) | Lakeside parkland | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$285
Lake Oconee in Georgia has eleven miles of shoreline, and this course wraps around the prettiest stretch of it.
Water comes into play on six holes, the houses behind the tees are larger than most hotels, and the whole experience feels like an extended vacation rather than a round of golf.
There are five other courses at the Reynolds resort, but this is the one everyone tries to get on first.
53. Highland Course at Primland (Virginia, USA)
Designer: Donald Steel (2006) | Mountain | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$295
The final tee at Primland hangs off a 3,000-foot cliff. You can hear hawks circling below you.
The whole course sits on a ridgeline in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and every hole feels like it’s about to slide off the edge.
Designed by an under-the-radar English architect, it’s not the toughest course you’ll play, but it might be the most photographed round you’ll ever shoot.
52. Hudson National Golf Club (New York, USA)
Designer: Tom Fazio (1996) | Parkland | Par 72 | Private | Members & guests only
An hour up the Hudson River from Manhattan, sculpted out of an old rock quarry, sits one of the more dramatic private clubs in the eastern US.
You can see the New York City skyline from a couple of the tees. Everything about it screams unlimited budget — perfect grass, perfect bunkers, perfect everything.
A beautiful exercise in what golf looks like when money is no object. You’ll need to know a member.
51. The Eastern Golf Club (Victoria, Australia)
Designer: Greg Norman & Bob Harrison (2014) | Sandbelt-style | Par 72 | Private | Members & guests only
Melbourne, Australia is quietly one of the great golf cities on earth — a stretch of sandy ground south of the city has produced more world-class courses per square mile than anywhere outside Scotland.
The Eastern is one of the newer ones, redesigned by Greg Norman after the club moved to better land.
The bunkering is dramatic, the elevation changes surprising, and it’s a fine warm-up if you’re in town for the more famous neighbors.
50. Crans-sur-Sierre Golf Club (Switzerland)
Designer: Harry Nicholson (1906), Seve Ballesteros redesign (1997) | Alpine | Par 72 | Public | Green fee ~CHF 200
Five thousand feet up in the Swiss Alps, the ball flies an extra 30 yards.
Crans hosts a European Tour event every September, and the Matterhorn appears on the back nine like a magic trick. Architectural purists shrug at the course itself — it’s not particularly subtle — but everyone else falls in love.
You play golf with the Alps in every direction. There are worse problems to have on a Tuesday.
49. Gozzer Ranch Golf & Lake Club (Idaho, USA)
Designer: Tom Fazio (2007) | Mountain lakeside | Par 72 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
Perched on a bluff hundreds of feet above Lake Coeur d’Alene in northern Idaho, Gozzer Ranch is one of those ultra-private clubs that nobody outside the membership talks about.
The closing two holes drop down toward the lake and are as dramatic as anything in American golf. The conditioning is immaculate. The setting is otherworldly.
The catch: you basically have to know someone to ever play it.
48. The Golf Club at Black Rock (Idaho, USA)
Designer: Jim Engh (2003) | Mountain | Par 71 | Private | Members & guests only
This is the weird one.
Designed by an architect who specializes in eccentricity, Black Rock features fairways that funnel like halfpipes, blind shots that shouldn’t work, and risk-or-reward decisions on nearly every hole. It sits above the same Idaho lake as Gozzer Ranch, but the personality could not be more different.
Half the people who play it think it’s brilliant. The other half think it’s nuts. Both might be right.
47. The Blackstone Course at Mission Hills Haikou (China)
Designer: Brian Curley (2009) | Volcanic | Par 73 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$200
Built on top of an ancient lava flow on China’s tropical Hainan Island, Blackstone uses real volcanic rock as hazards. You cannot fake terrain like this.
The resort complex it sits in is the largest in the world — ten courses on one property — but Blackstone is the standout.
Dramatic, exotic, and unlike anywhere else you’ll tee it up. Worth the trip if you’re already in Asia.
46. Assoufid Golf Club (Morocco)
Designer: Niall Cameron (2009) | Desert links-style | Par 72 | Public | Green fee ~€100
Red dust, argan trees, and the snow-capped Atlas Mountains on the horizon.
Assoufid sits just outside Marrakech and feels like nowhere else in golf — half desert, half links, all distinctly Moroccan. Built recently by a less-famous designer, it has none of the manufactured feel of typical desert resorts.
The clubhouse is gorgeous, the staff are warm, and the round costs a fraction of what you’d pay in Dubai. A genuine sleeper.
45. Emirates Golf Club – Majlis Course (UAE)
Designer: Karl Litten (1988) | Desert | Par 72 | Public | Green fee ~$270
This was the very first grass course built in the Middle East — they trucked soil in from elsewhere to make it happen.
It still hosts the Dubai Desert Classic every January, one of the European Tour’s marquee events. The 8th tee at sunrise, with the Dubai skyline shimmering through the heat haze, is on every Gulf golfer’s mental checklist.
A desert-golf pioneer, and still one of the best in the region.
44. Punta Espada Golf Club (Dominican Republic)
Designer: Jack Nicklaus (2006) | Tropical coastal | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$395
Eight holes touch the Caribbean Sea.
Three of them — 13, 17, and 18 — make up one of the great closing stretches in tropical golf. Designed by Jack Nicklaus (yes, that Nicklaus), Punta Espada sits on the southeastern tip of the Dominican Republic and delivers about as much fun as $400 can buy you.
The water is so blue that your photos look filtered. They aren’t.
43. Quivira Golf Club (Mexico)
Designer: Jack Nicklaus (2014) | Clifftop coastal | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$425
You’re hitting tee shots over 300-foot cliffs into the Pacific.
Quivira is perched on the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja peninsula, and it is possibly the most visually dramatic golf course on earth — every hole seems to dangle off a cliff. Another Nicklaus design, and one of his most aggressive.
Whether the architecture deserves the setting is debatable. Whether your jaw will drop multiple times is not.
42. Kawana Golf Club – Fuji Course (Japan)
Designer: Charles Alison (1936) | Coastal parkland | Par 72 | Hotel guest | Green fee ~$260
Mt. Fuji on the horizon. Sagami Bay below you.
A classic 1936 layout that almost nobody outside Japan has heard of. Charles Alison was a British architect who worked all over the world, and his Fuji Course at Kawana is one of his masterpieces — strategic, beautiful, almost cinematic.
Hard to get to, hard to get on, but anyone serious about golf travel should have it written down somewhere.
41. El Camaleón Golf Course (Mexico)
Designer: Greg Norman (2007) | Jungle coastal | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$395
You have to hit your tee shot on the 7th over an open cenote — a natural sinkhole filled with crystal-clear groundwater, sacred to the ancient Maya.
There is no other course on the planet that asks this of you. El Camaleón weaves through jungle, mangrove, and limestone on Mexico’s Yucatán coast, and it hosts a PGA Tour event every November.
Genuinely weird, genuinely fun, genuinely Mexican.
40. Leopard Creek Country Club (South Africa)
Designer: Gary Player (1996) | Bushveld parkland | Par 72 | Resort & member-guest | Green fee ~$200
You can see hippos in the river while you putt on the 13th green.
Leopard Creek sits on the western edge of Kruger National Park, and the wildlife is real — no chainlink fence anywhere on the property. Designed by South African golf legend Gary Player, it ranks first in his country and features one of the great closing par 5s on the African continent.
“Memorable” doesn’t begin to cover it.
39. Yas Links (Abu Dhabi, UAE)
Designer: Kyle Phillips (2010) | Links | Par 72 | Public | Green fee ~$230
Building a Scottish-style links course — meaning windswept, treeless, bouncy fairways and proper dunes — in the United Arab Emirates sounds absurd.
They built it anyway, on a reclaimed sandbank in Abu Dhabi, and somehow it works. The wind off the Persian Gulf is real. The dunes feel ancient even though they were shaped a decade ago.
You’d swear you were in the Scottish Highlands until a camel walks by.
38. Wentworth Club – West Course (England, UK)
Designer: Harry Colt (1926), Ernie Els revisions (2010) | Heathland | Par 72 | Private | Members & guests only
Every May, the European Tour’s flagship championship comes here, and millions of people watch it on television without realizing how good the course actually is.
Wentworth, southwest of London, sits among ancient pines and rhododendrons, with greens that have humbled some of the best players in Europe for nearly a century.
You’ve seen it on TV more than you realize. The in-person experience exceeds it.
37. Castle Stuart Golf Links (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Mark Parsinen & Gil Hanse (2009) | Links | Par 72 | Public | Green fee ~£225
A bright white art-deco clubhouse, visible for miles across the Moray Firth in northern Scotland — that’s the first thing you see at Castle Stuart, and somehow it sets up everything else.
The course opened in 2009 and is widely considered the best traditional links course built anywhere in the world in a century.
The sea breeze does what sea breezes do. You leave promising yourself you’ll come back.
36. Pasatiempo Golf Club (California, USA)
Designer: Alister Mackenzie (1929) | Coastal parkland | Par 70 | Public daily-fee | Green fee ~$420
The man who designed Augusta National loved this Northern California course so much that he moved into a house across the road and lived there until he died in 1934.
Alister Mackenzie’s Pasatiempo, opened in 1929, is one of those rare world-class designs that anyone can play — daily fee, no membership required. The back nine, cut through deep ravines, is jaw-dropping.
A genuine pilgrimage at a reasonable price.
35. Peachtree Golf Club (Georgia, USA)
Designer: Bobby Jones & Robert Trent Jones Sr. (1948) | Parkland | Par 72 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
What if Bobby Jones — the legendary American amateur golfer who founded Augusta — had built a second course that was almost as good and infinitely more private?
He did. Peachtree, just outside Atlanta, is the result. Almost no civilian has seen it. Those who have call it one of the finest pure parkland courses in America.
The membership is famously discreet. The course is famously special.
34. Gleneagles – King’s Course (Scotland, UK)
Designer: James Braid (1919) | Highland heathland | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~£300
In 1919, the most prolific Scottish course designer who ever lived built a highland course at a brand-new resort hotel, and it has barely changed since.
James Braid’s King’s Course at Gleneagles is the kind of golf that teaches you about strategy by quietly punishing you for not having any. Three par 4s in the middle of the round will haunt you.
The hotel afterward will redeem you.
33. Somerset Hills Country Club (New Jersey, USA)
Designer: A.W. Tillinghast (1917) | Parkland | Par 71 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
The most secret world-class course in America.
Somerset Hills is so quiet about itself that most American golfers have never heard of it, which is exactly how the membership prefers it. Built in 1918 by one of the great early-1900s architects, it features holes you’ve never seen and won’t forget.
The 2nd is one of the most-copied designs in golf history. You will probably never play it.
32. North Berwick Golf Club (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Evolved from 1832 (various hands) | Links | Par 71 | Public bookings | Green fee ~£295
You play a tee shot over an actual stone wall. The 13th green is hidden behind another one.
The whole course is a series of charmingly weird ideas that wouldn’t be allowed today — and it’s been there since 1832.
North Berwick sits on the Firth of Forth east of Edinburgh, and it might be the most purely fun round of golf in Scotland, possibly anywhere. Bring a sense of humor.
31. Real Club Valderrama (Spain)
Designer: Robert Trent Jones Sr. (1974, redesigned 1985) | Mediterranean parkland | Par 71 | Limited public booking | Green fee ~€450
Cork oak trees frame every fairway.
Valderrama, in the hills above the Costa del Sol in southern Spain, has been called continental Europe’s Augusta — and it’s the only mainland European course to have hosted a Ryder Cup, when Seve Ballesteros captained Europe to victory in 1997.
Punishing greens, dramatic terrain, a feeling that every hole is asking you a serious strategic question. The best mainland European course, by general agreement.
30. Royal Lytham & St Annes Golf Club (England, UK)
Designer: George Lowe (1897), Harry Colt revisions | Links | Par 70 | Members & limited public | Green fee ~£320
In 1979, Seve Ballesteros won his first major championship here by hitting a famous shot from the parking lot. He shouldn’t have been in the parking lot.
He hit a recovery for the ages.
Royal Lytham, on England’s northwest coast, has hosted eleven Open Championships and features more deep, hidden bunkers than seems strictly fair — over 200 of them. An inland-feeling course that hits harder than its modest dunes suggest.
29. Royal Troon Golf Club (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Charles Hunter (1878), James Braid revisions | Links | Par 71 | Visitor times available | Green fee ~£440
There’s a par 3 here called the Postage Stamp.
It’s 123 yards long, the green is the actual size of a postage stamp, and the bunkers around it are deep enough to lose a person in.
Royal Troon, on Scotland’s west coast, has hosted the Open Championship nine times. Every great golfer of the last century has stood on that 8th tee and tried — often failed — to hit the green.
28. Royal St George’s Golf Club (England, UK)
Designer: William Laidlaw Purves (1887) | Links | Par 70 | Visitor times available | Green fee ~£395
Bouncing fairways that send a perfect drive into a terrible spot.
Royal St George’s, on the southeast coast of England in Kent, is the wildest, most unpredictable Open Championship venue — the kind of course where good shots get punished and bad shots sometimes find the green.
Darren Clarke won his only major here in 2011, in tears. Greg Norman won here in 1993 with one of the great final-round scores ever shot.
27. Whistling Straits (Wisconsin, USA)
Designer: Pete Dye (1998) | Links-style | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$525
It looks like Ireland. It’s actually Wisconsin.
Whistling Straits was built on the shore of Lake Michigan, on what used to be a military base, and it does a remarkably convincing impression of a rugged Irish coastal course three thousand miles east.
Over a thousand bunkers, walking only, sheep grazing the rough. Pete Dye — one of America’s most theatrical designers — built it. It’s where the U.S. crushed Europe in the 2021 Ryder Cup.
26. Cabot Cliffs (Nova Scotia, Canada)
Designer: Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw (2015) | Links | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$310
Imagine a par 3 hung over the Atlantic Ocean, the kind of hole that gets photographed approximately ten thousand times a day.
That’s the 16th at Cabot Cliffs, on the windswept coast of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. The course only opened in 2015 but already ranks among the best in the world.
Walking only. Stunning. By Canadian standards — disarmingly friendly. The best new resort course on the continent.
25. Cape Kidnappers Golf Course (New Zealand)
Designer: Tom Doak (2004) | Clifftop links | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$360
Several of the holes here finish on fingers of land that drop hundreds of feet straight down into the Pacific Ocean.
Cape Kidnappers, on New Zealand’s North Island, was designed by an American architect with a reputation for the minimalist and the wild.
The walks between holes are part of the experience. So is the sense — never fully shaken — that you might fall off the planet. Unlike anywhere else in golf.
24. Bandon Trails (Oregon, USA)
Designer: Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw (2005) | Coastal forest & dunes | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$395
Of the five courses at the famous Bandon Dunes resort on the Oregon coast, this is the only one that doesn’t touch the ocean.
Some serious people will tell you it’s the best of the bunch anyway. Built by the team that has redefined modern golf design — Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw — Bandon Trails winds through coastal forest, meadow, and dune.
Quieter than its siblings, and probably better. Heretical, but defensible.
23. Riviera Country Club (California, USA)
Designer: George C. Thomas Jr. (1926) | Canyon parkland | Par 71 | Private | Members & guests only
Ben Hogan won so often here in the 1940s and ’50s that the locals called it Hogan’s Alley.
Riviera, in a canyon between Beverly Hills and the Pacific, is one of America’s most cinematic courses — and one of its strangest. The 6th hole has a bunker in the middle of the green, which sounds insane and isn’t.
It still hosts the Genesis Invitational, one of the PGA Tour’s most prestigious events every February.
22. Sunningdale Golf Club – Old Course (England, UK)
Designer: Willie Park Jr. (1900), Harry Colt revisions | Heathland | Par 70 | Visitor times available | Green fee ~£395
Bobby Jones — the greatest amateur golfer who ever lived — once played a round here that he later called the most perfect round of his life. He shot 66.
Sunningdale, west of London, is the gold standard of English inland golf: a flowing, heather-fringed course on sandy ground that doesn’t feel like England at all.
Every Londoner with golf in their veins has a Sunningdale story. After your round, you should too.
21. TPC Sawgrass – Stadium Course (Florida, USA)
Designer: Pete Dye (1980) | Marshland | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$725
You know that island green you’ve seen on television a thousand times? It’s real, and it’s terrifying.
TPC Sawgrass hosts the Players Championship every March, and the par-3 17th — a tiny green surrounded entirely by water — has become one of the most famous shots in the world.
Purists complain that it’s a gimmick. Everyone else can’t wait to play it. The pull is undeniable.
20. Loch Lomond Golf Club (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Tom Weiskopf & Jay Morrish (1996) | Parkland | Par 71 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
On the shore of Scotland’s largest lake, with Ben Lomond mountain looming over the back nine, sits the prettiest non-coastal course in Scotland.
Loch Lomond hosted the Scottish Open for a decade in the 2000s, and the place has the otherworldly quality of a movie set.
Ferociously private — oligarch private — but if you ever get on, the rhododendron blooms in June are something else entirely. Pack a camera.
19. Kingsbarns Golf Links (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Kyle Phillips (2000) | Links | Par 72 | Public | Green fee ~£345
It looks like it’s been there since 1850. It was actually built from a flat farm field in 2000.
Kingsbarns, just down the coast from St Andrews, is one of the great architectural illusions in modern golf — a manufactured links course so convincing that visitors regularly assume it’s centuries old.
Five holes touch the North Sea. The wind is always there. The whole experience is a small miracle.
18. Muirfield Village Golf Club (Ohio, USA)
Designer: Jack Nicklaus & Desmond Muirhead (1974) | Parkland | Par 72 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
Jack Nicklaus, the greatest American golfer who ever lived, built this course in his Ohio hometown as his architectural calling card.
Every spring it hosts the Memorial Tournament. Every spring the best players in the world come to Dublin, Ohio and complain about how hard it is.
Pristine, brutal, fair. About as close as American golf gets to a clinical examination of your full game. Jack is usually watching.
17. Carnoustie Golf Links (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Allan Robertson (1842), James Braid revisions (1926) | Links | Par 72 | Public | Green fee ~£295
The professionals call it Carnasty.
Carnoustie has hosted the Open Championship eight times on Scotland’s east coast, and the course has the deserved reputation as the hardest, meanest, most heartbreaking venue on the rotation.
In 1999, a French golfer named Jean van de Velde led by three shots on the final hole, then waded into a small evil stream called the Barry Burn — and lost the title. The burn is still there.
16. The Old Course at Ballybunion (Ireland)
Designer: Lionel Hewson (1893), Tom Simpson revisions | Links | Par 71 | Public | Green fee ~€275
Tom Watson, the five-time Open Champion, once called Ballybunion the way the game was meant to be played. He played it on his honeymoon.
On the southwest coast of Ireland, surrounded by enormous grass-covered dunes and crashing Atlantic surf, this is what most golfers picture when they imagine Irish coastal golf — and the real thing somehow exceeds the imagination.
The par 3s along the cliff have no equal anywhere.
15. Royal Portrush Golf Club – Dunluce Course (Northern Ireland, UK)
Designer: Harry Colt (1932 redesign) | Links | Par 72 | Visitor times available | Green fee ~£275
In 2019, for the first time in 68 years, the Open Championship returned to Northern Ireland.
An Irishman named Shane Lowry won, the home crowd lost its mind, and the world remembered how good this course is.
Royal Portrush sits on the Antrim coast, with views of the Giant’s Causeway in the distance. The 5th hole, called White Rocks, plays toward a cliff edge so dramatic that conversation stops on the tee.
14. Bandon Dunes (Oregon, USA)
Designer: David McLay Kidd (1999) | Links | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$395
In the late 1990s, an Oregon greeting-card millionaire bought a remote stretch of the Pacific coast and bet his fortune that Americans would fly across the country to play golf the way the Scots played it five hundred years ago.
He was right. Bandon Dunes is the course that started the modern American revolution — walking only, treeless, windswept, sublime.
It changed what Americans expected from a golf vacation. It still defines it.
13. Pinehurst No. 2 (North Carolina, USA)
Designer: Donald Ross (1907), Coore-Crenshaw restoration (2011) | Sandhills parkland | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$650
The greens here are shaped like upside-down saucers. Hit a perfect approach and your ball might still roll off the back.
Pinehurst No. 2, in the sandhills of North Carolina, was the life’s work of a Scottish-born American architect named Donald Ross, who lived next to the course and tinkered with it for decades.
It has hosted four U.S. Opens with a fifth on the books. Sacred American ground.
12. Merion Golf Club – East Course (Pennsylvania, USA)
Designer: Hugh Wilson (1912) | Parkland | Par 70 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
126 acres. That’s all there is.
Merion, just outside Philadelphia, is the most efficient masterpiece in golf — a tiny piece of land that has somehow hosted five U.S. Opens, including Ben Hogan’s miraculous 1950 victory eighteen months after a car crash that nearly killed him.
The flagsticks are topped with woven wicker baskets instead of flags. The closing three holes, cut through an old stone quarry, will haunt you.
11. Winged Foot Golf Club – West Course (New York, USA)
Designer: A.W. Tillinghast (1923) | Parkland | Par 72 | Private | Members & guests only
In 2006, Phil Mickelson stood on the final tee at Winged Foot needing a par to win his second straight U.S. Open. He made double bogey.
“I am such an idiot,” he said afterward, and golf historians have been quoting it ever since.
The course, an hour north of Manhattan, is famous for greens that humble the best players in the world. Brutal, beautiful, deeply American. A genuine major championship test.
10. Turnberry – Ailsa Course (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Mackenzie Ross (1951), Martin Ebert redesign (2016) | Links | Par 71 | Resort guest | Green fee ~£525
A lighthouse, a mountain across the sea, and a craggy island called Ailsa Craig in the middle distance.
Turnberry, on the southwest coast of Scotland, might be the most beautiful golf course on earth.
In 1977, Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus played head-to-head over 36 holes here in what’s still called the Duel in the Sun — a final-round 65 versus 66 — and golfers have argued about it ever since. The course earned every word.
9. National Golf Links of America (New York, USA)
Designer: Charles Blair Macdonald (1909) | Links | Par 73 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
Built in 1909 by a Chicago millionaire who had gone to Scotland and refused to come home the same person.
Charles Blair Macdonald spent years studying the great holes of Scotland and England, then came back to a windswept piece of Long Island and rebuilt them all. National Golf Links is the course that taught America what golf architecture could be.
Almost no one has played it. Everyone in the design world has studied it.
8. Royal Melbourne Golf Club – West Course (Victoria, Australia)
Designer: Alister Mackenzie & Alex Russell (1931) | Sandbelt | Par 72 | Private | Members & guests only
The sand in southern Melbourne is so perfect for golf that it makes the courses there feel almost unfair.
Royal Melbourne, designed in 1926 by the same architect who would later build Augusta National, is the cornerstone of the most renowned cluster of courses outside the British Isles.
The bunkering — wild, sharp-edged, sandy as a beach — is what designers all over the world have been trying to copy ever since. Firm. Fast. Sublime.
7. Royal Dornoch Golf Club (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Old Tom Morris (1886), John Sutherland revisions | Links | Par 70 | Public | Green fee ~£295
You have to genuinely want to get to Royal Dornoch.
It’s a six-hour drive north from Edinburgh, in the Scottish Highlands, almost to the Arctic Circle by feel. Tom Watson said playing it was the most fun he ever had on a golf course.
The layout is barely changed from when it was first traced out in the 1880s. One hole, called Foxy, has not a single bunker — and is, somehow, perfect.
6. Muirfield (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Old Tom Morris (1891), Harry Colt revisions | Links | Par 71 | Limited visitor times | Green fee ~£395
This is the oldest golf club in the world.
The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, founded in 1744, has its home course at Muirfield, on Scotland’s east coast — and most touring professionals will quietly tell you it’s the fairest, smartest course on the Open Championship rotation.
The front nine plays clockwise. The back nine plays counter-clockwise. Every hole is a different wind. Tight, demanding, perfectly honest. The thinking golfer’s pilgrimage.
5. Pebble Beach Golf Links (California, USA)
Designer: Jack Neville & Douglas Grant (1919) | Coastal cliffs | Par 72 | Resort guest | Green fee ~$725
Five holes — the 6th through the 10th — strung along the cliffs of Carmel Bay in California. That’s the round.
Jack Nicklaus once called the second shot on the 8th the best in golf. Tom Watson chipped in on the 17th in 1982 to win the U.S. Open. Five Opens have been played here and a sixth is coming.
Public access. Bring your savings. Don’t think twice. You will never forget it.
4. Royal County Down Golf Club (Northern Ireland, UK)
Designer: Old Tom Morris (1889), Harry Colt revisions | Links | Par 71 | Visitor times available | Green fee ~£325
The Mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea behind the 9th green at Royal County Down, and the line — written by an Irish songwriter in the 1800s — is exactly as beautiful as it sounds.
The course, in a tiny town in Northern Ireland, has heather-fringed bunkers and blind tee shots and a front nine that some panels rank as the single best nine holes anywhere.
Tom Watson said it’s the course he’d play if he had only one round left.
3. Cypress Point Club (California, USA)
Designer: Alister Mackenzie & Robert Hunter (1928) | Coastal cliffs | Par 72 | Ultra-private | Members & guests only
Three holes — the 15th, 16th, and 17th — hung over the crashing Pacific on California’s Monterey Peninsula. The 16th is a 230-yard tee shot over open ocean.
Cypress Point is the most exclusive serious club in American golf, possibly anywhere, and one of the architectural saints — Ben Crenshaw — called it the Sistine Chapel of the game.
He wasn’t being poetic. He was being literal. The course is a religious experience.
2. St Andrews Links – Old Course (Scotland, UK)
Designer: Evolved; Old Tom Morris refinements | Links | Par 72 | Public via daily ballot | Green fee ~£320
This is where golf comes from.
The Old Course at St Andrews has been played continuously, on the same patch of Scottish coastal ground, since the 1400s. It wasn’t designed — it evolved, refined over centuries by the wind and by Old Tom Morris, the godfather of the modern game.
The Swilcan Bridge, the Road Hole, the Valley of Sin.
You don’t tick the Old Course off a list. You change for having walked it.
1. Augusta National Golf Club (Georgia, USA)
Designer: Alister Mackenzie & Bobby Jones (1933) | Parkland | Par 72 | Invitation only | Members & guests only
The most famous, most photographed, most desired round of golf on earth.
Augusta National in Georgia hosts the Masters every April — the patrons in their white folding chairs, the pimento cheese sandwiches, the impossibly fast greens, the back nine on Sunday with a green jacket on the line.
Almost impossible to play unless you happen to know a member. That impossibility is part of the spell.
Amen Corner — the 11th, 12th, and 13th — is as good as advertised. Possibly better.
I’m Chris and I run this website – a resource about symbolism, metaphors, idioms, and a whole lot more! Thanks for dropping by.