These courses top Golfweek’s Best rankings in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic Islands and Central America.
Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2022 list of top golf courses in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands and Central America.
The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final, cumulative rating. Then each course is ranked against other courses in the region.
This list focuses on the golf courses themselves, not the resorts as a whole or other amenities. Each golf course included is listed with its average rating from 1 to 10, its location, architect(s) and the year it opened.
The new layout will join Jack Nicklaus’ original course at the property that offers stunning views of the Pacific Ocean.
Jack Nicklaus will return to Mexico to build a second course at Quivira Los Cabos, where he designed Quivira Golf Club that opened in 2014.
The routing is in progress, and ground is expected to be broken by the end of 2022 for the as-yet-to-be-named new Jack Nicklaus Signature course. It will be laid out in the northwest portion of the 1,850-acre development in rolling desert foothills and valleys interlaced with arroyos, and the southern portion of the course will offer panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean.
“The first golf course at Quivira is a spectacular layout playing across a remarkable piece of property,” Nicklaus said in a media release announcing the news Tuesday. “Now, I am excited that design is well underway on the second course at Quivira, which should be stunning and equally as spectacular. I hope golfers who play the second course will enjoy the views, the quality of golf, and the challenge.”
The original course at the property, Quivira Golf Club, tied for No. 25 on Golfweek’s Best 2021 list of courses in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands, and Central America.
Streamsong celebrates its 10th anniversary with three highly ranked courses in Florida, but how do you choose the best of the lot?
The question comes all the time from players who have frequented top golf resorts in the U.S. and want to verify their opinions, as well as from golfers who have never played a certain top destination but dream of a trip.
“Which course at the resort is your favorite?”
Normally there’s a simple response, based on the evaluation of Golfweek’s Best Resort Courses list.
Going to Kiawah Island Golf Resort in South Carolina? There are several courses available, but you must experience the Ocean Course. Destination Kohler in Wisconsin? Sure, Blackwolf Run offers two strong layouts, but Whistling Straits is the clear favorite among the resort’s four full-size tracks. Pinehurst in North Carolina? As much admiration as the recently renovated No. 4 has received among an impressive roster that includes four of the top 200 resort courses in the U.S., Donald Ross’s No. 2 is a classic masterpiece and repeat U.S. Open site that clearly shines brightest among the resort’s offerings in the rankings. Pebble Beach Golf Links is part of a larger California resort that stuns, but the classic seaside track is a can’t-miss for golfers.
But the answer to which is best isn’t always so cut-and-dried.
Which is your favorite of the five 18-hole courses at Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon? There’s plenty of debate around the fireplace outside McKee’s Pub, and all five courses rank in the top 11 on the 2022 Golfweek’s Best Resort Courses list. There really isn’t a wrong answer when all the options are that strong.
How about the best of the two current courses at Sand Valley in Wisconsin? The resort is operated by Michael and Chris Keiser, sons of Bandon Dunes founder Mike Keiser, and as at Bandon Dunes the Golfweek’s Best list doesn’t necessarily establish a definitive winner between the eponymous Sand Valley layout and the resort’s Mammoth Dunes, both top-15 resort courses. Grab an Adirondack chair behind the clubhouse and let the “Which is better?” discussions begin.
Streamsong Red and Blue are intertwined. (Courtesy of Streamsong)
It’s the same story at Streamsong in Bowling Green, Florida, home to three courses ranked inside the top 20 on the 2022 Golfweek’s Best Resort Courses List. Red? Blue? Black? “If you had to play just one,” I am frequently asked, “which would it be?”
My stock answer: The next one. And I’ll defend that simplified response on the basis that I’ll gladly take a day at any of the three courses built by Gil Hanse, Tom Doak or the team of Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw. There are noticeable differences between the layouts, but they are so tightly packed in the Golfweek’s Best rankings as to inevitably invite debate – that’s a big part of the fun. Ask me which you should play, and I’ll tell you to sample all three and get back to me.
Bandon Dunes, Sand Valley and Streamsong combine to include 10 of the top 20 resort courses in the country. Apologies in advance for my dalliance into cliché, but asking to choose the best layout at any of them is like being asked which of your kids is your favorite. Only in this case, golfers often are more than willing to loudly announce their personal preferences.
Me? Not so much. Returning to Streamsong as a case study, there’s nuance to be considered. And the skill of the golfer. Putting prowess. The wind on any given day. Dozens of considerations, many of which change in time and with repeat rounds. Feel free to pick a favorite, but don’t be surprised to change your mind on another visit.
The Lodge at Streamsong in Florida (Courtesy of Streamsong)
Streamsong celebrates its 10th anniversary this year, inviting reinspection of its leap into the course rankings. Much has changed since the two original courses, the Red and the Blue, opened in 2012 on a former phosphate mining site that offered plenty of sand and a raw, rollicking landscape unlike anything else in Florida. A luxurious 228-room hotel and spa opened in 2014, auxiliary sports such as shooting and bass fishing were introduced, and most importantly the Black course came online in 2017.
The resort and courses continue to evolve, recently with the introduction of new putting surfaces on the Red and Blue and with new restaurant themes and names that include the rebranding of the Black course’s Bone Valley Tavern into a seafood restaurant – the staff might suggest the salt and pepper fritto misto, and you can’t go wrong with the lobster mac and cheese.
Despite the changes, the focus remains on the golf, perhaps more sharply than ever.
The three layouts share many similarities: strikingly open vistas and easy walks with few trees in play, mostly firm and bouncy turf, beautiful bunkers that appear as simple sand scrapes and great mixes of memorable holes routed in natural fashions upon what in actuality are completely unnatural sites left over from mining operations. A common refrain is that Streamsong, full of jagged dunes and rugged boundaries in middle-of-nowhere inner Florida, feels like playing golf on the surface of the moon – in the case of these three courses, that is a compliment.
The top 200 resort courses in the U.S. stretch from Pebble Beach and Bandon Dunes to Whistling Straits and Pinehurst.
Welcome to Golfweek’s Best 2022 list of top resort golf courses in the United States.
The hundreds of members of our course-ratings panel continually evaluate courses and rate them based on our 10 criteria. They also file a single, overall rating on each course. Those overall ratings on each course are averaged to produce a final, cumulative rating. Then each course is ranked against other courses in the region.
This list focuses on the golf courses themselves, not the resorts as a whole or other amenities. Each golf course included is listed with its average rating from 1 to 10, its location, architect(s) and the year it opened.
Landmand, Te Arai, among others have golf architecture fans champing at the bit for 2022 to arrive.
After a decade of course closings dominating the headlines starting with the economic downturn in 2008, architects have been busier moving earth over the past several years. Coast to coast as well as abroad, several top-tier layouts have come online from noted architects – think Tom Doak, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, even Tiger Woods.
This new year promises more of the same, with the following five new courses being among those I can’t wait to see in 2022.
In keeping with recent development trends, these courses aren’t necessarily close to major population centers. Only one of them – the East Course at PGA Frisco – is near a big city, situated as it is on the northern outskirts of Dallas. The other four on this list? You’ll need planes, trains, automobiles or maybe a boat, and definitely a passport.
Doesn’t matter. Great golf is worth any travel. So in no particular order, here are five new courses I want to sink my nubby spikes into during 2022.
Tiger Woods and 19 other pros will play with family members at the Ritz-Carlton Golf Club.
The Ritz-Carlton Golf Club, Orlando, Grande Lakes – site of this week’s PNC Championship – was designed by Greg Norman and opened in 2003 less than 10 miles from Walt Disney World.
After pro-ams Thursday and Friday, 20 teams will compete in the tournament proper Saturday and Sunday. Originally named the Father-Son Challenge, the current format includes pro golfers partnered with either a parent or child. The main attraction will be the return of Tiger Woods to competitive golf as he pairs with son Charlie less than a year after a single-car crash in California left the 15-time major champion with significant injuries.
Grande Lakes will play at 7,122 yards with a par of 72 for the pros. Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the pros face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
Ernie Els designed the course at Albany, which opened in 2010
Albany in New Providence, the Bahamas – site of this week’s Hero World Challenge – was designed by Ernie Els and opened in 2010. It is part of a 600-acre luxury resort community owned by a Tavistock group that includes Els, Tiger Woods, and Justin Timberlake.
Albany ties for No. 20 on the 2021 list of Golfweek’s Best Courses in Mexico, the Caribbean, the Atlantic islands, and Central America. It will play at 7,302 yards with a par of 72 for the Hero World Challenge.
Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges the pros face this week. Check out the maps of each hole below.
Wynn has one of the highest costs of a daily-fee course in the United States.
Wynn Golf Club, right behind the Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino, fits perfectly into its brash surroundings on the Strip. It’s as Vegas as Vegas can be when it comes to golf course architecture.
Much of the course is brand new, despite golf having been played on the site since 1952 when it became the Desert Inn Golf Club.
Steve Wynn purchased the resort in 2000, and the Tom Fazio-designed Wynn Golf Club opened in 2005. But that layout was shuttered in 2017 as the operators of the adjacent Wynn Las Vegas hotel and casino considered other uses for the ridiculously valuable land on which the course sits, and the resort lost millions of dollars in revenue from green fees and other golf-attributable casino earnings.
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After scrapping plans to build a lagoon on the site with new hotel rooms and restaurants, Fazio and his son, Logan, were called to breathe fresh life into the abandoned track. Wynn Golf Club reopened in October 2019 with eight new and 10 refurbished holes, playing to a par of 70 at 6,722 yards.
As far as playing Wynn Golf Club, you don’t have to know someone who knows someone. You just have to have some disposable income.
Tee times can be made by resort guests 90 days in advance, and general public play is open with 30-day advanced bookings. But be ready to fork over the cash: green fees are $550.
Wynn has one of the highest costs of a daily-fee course in the U.S. and while that sounds prohibitively expensive for many players, there are plenty of guests at the Wynn hotel and casino who spin through a lot more on the slot machines in less time than it takes to play a round of golf.
Brian Hawthorne, the resort’s executive director of golf operations, said there’s a lot of value baked into that fee when considering the location on the Strip as well as an all-inclusive experience that includes forecaddie and rental clubs if needed.
“And if you keep somebody from gambling for four and a half hours, we might be saving people money,” he said with a laugh.
So while that kind of green fee is not for every golfer, Hawthorne is right. As he said, “There’s different price points for every type of customer,” and many of the luxury resort’s guests simply aren’t worried about price. This is, after all, a Forbes Five-Star property that uses Rolls-Royce limos to whisk preferred guests back and forth to the airport.
Davis Love III, the unofficial mayor of the island, helped give Southern Soul a new lease on life, and it later returned the favor.
ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – Smoke rolled from the side of the building. Within minutes flames leapt from the roof. By the time the fire department extinguished the blaze, the roof had collapsed and Southern Soul, the half-century-old converted gas station that Harrison Sapp and Griffin Bufkin had turned into a haven for barbecue lovers was gutted.
The fire happened in 2010, just months after Guy Fieri of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” the Food Network favorite, had filmed a segment that was bound to shoot Southern Soul to stardom. But to hear Sapp tell it, something special resulted from their hopes and dreams going up in smoke.
“The whole island took care of us,” Sapp said. “The building was still smoking, I thought our little dream was done and he’s standing there telling me we could use his warehouse for as long as we needed to.”
He is Davis Love III, PGA Championship winner, Ryder Cup captain, host of the island’s PGA Tour stop, the RSM Classic, who grew up on this part of a chain of barrier islands nicknamed the Golden Isles, working in the cart barn as a teenager and cutting the crab grass out of the greens at Sea Island’s Seaside Course with a hook knife. Love, the unofficial mayor of the island, helped give the restaurant a new lease on life.
Just weeks after the fire, Southern Soul was back in business, operating first under a canvas tarpaulin and then a mobile food trailer. Sapp remembers being hot and sweaty and just plain dirty. Every chance he could, he’d escape for some A/C.
“I would go into their office (at Crown Sports Management, which represents Love) like Kramer in ‘Seinfeld’ and just sit on their couch and talk to them forever,” Sapp recalled. “We just became friends.”
Bufkin and Sapp had served Love over the years in their previous lives as bartenders at various island establishments, but they struck up a friendship over food.
“Davis loves barbecue more than anybody you’ve ever met,” Sapp said. “He’d rather be cooking barbecue than anything.”
— Southern Soul BBQ (@southernsoulbbq) April 3, 2020
That segment of “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” aired in the fall of 2010, not long after Southern Soul moved back into a restored version of its original restaurant at the side of a roundabout just a mile off the beach. Business boomed.
“It’s amazing what happens when he comes,” Love said of Fieri. Not long after, Garden & Gun heaped praise and pretty soon it snowballed to Southern Living proclaiming Southern Soul “the best barbecue in the south.”
During the RSM Classic, if you’re looking to meet a professional golfer, just take a seat at one of Southern Soul’s picnic tables and wait. Jimmy Walker and Trey Mullinax were among the first pros to show up. Walker critiqued the brisket, and Mullinax wondered why they closed so early. Zach Johnson, Jonathan Byrd, Keith Mitchell, Hudson Swafford and Harris English – who says, “It’s hard to beat that weekday worker pulled pork sandwich and fries, but I need a nap afterwards,” – are among the local pros who eat there regularly.
“When they are younger they eat there a lot,” Sapp said. “When they get married, their wives don’t let them go there as much. They won’t say that, but that’s the truth.”
On Tuesday of tournament week, Sapp began cooking in the oak-fired Lang and Oyler pits at 1 a.m. to cater lunch on the driving range at Sea Island, which has become a tradition like no other.
Love, who likes to stop by for the Thursday pastrami special, inquired after the fire about expanding the business and ended up going in as a partner in Southern Soul. (In 2019, they opened a second restaurant, Frosty’s Griddle and Shake – you haven’t lived until you’ve tried the Davis Love III pimento cheeseburger – and currently have a building under contract in Brunswick, Georgia, for their first restaurant off island.)
“Yeah, I’m shocked how it has blown up,” said Love, who can be found pitching in to cook Boston butt, smoked for 12-14 hours over oak, at Southern Soul when they are short-handed. “I’m their least talented, highest-priced employee.”
Love moved to the island as a child in 1978, when his father, famed teaching pro Davis Love Jr., was given a blank slate to start an instructional school anywhere in the country he wanted. He chose Sea Island Resort, and Davis has called this place halfway between Savannah, Georgia and Jacksonville, Florida, home ever since. With his golf and business successes, Love, the winner of 21 PGA Tour titles, could have moved anywhere, but he and wife Robin, his high-school sweetheart, never considered leaving and built a home nestled among live oaks and palms on a secluded five-acre lot with prime marsh frontage. For a decade, Love hosted the RSM Classic’s pro-am draft party in a tent in his backyard, where participants feasted on the island’s best low-country cuisine, including barbecue from Southern Soul.
Sapp gets all choked up when he thinks of Love’s contributions to the community, some of which are well-documented through his Davis Love Foundation, which has raised more than $14 million in its first 12 years hosting the tournament to support charities focused on children and families in need. But there are other acts of kindness for which Love seeks no publicity. Take, for one, how Love cooked up all the food in their freezer and gave it away to locals when the island lost power during a hurricane a few years ago, and his efforts to support the restaurant business when COVID-19 hit and threatened many of his regular haunts.
“He would book parties with them and pre-pay for everything – jeez it is hard to talk about – to help them pay their rent,” Sapp said. “He wouldn’t say he was paying their rent, but that’s basically what he was doing. He booked two parties with us that he didn’t have for a year and a half. He was doing that all over the island. I mean, he’s legit. I’d kill somebody for him.”
Flames fully engulf the St. Simons Island home of Davis Love III in 2020. [Kyle Jurgens, Glynn County Fire and Rescue]On March 27, 2020, 10 years to the day that Southern Soul burned to the ground, Love’s home was destroyed in an early-morning two-alarm fire. Thankfully, no one was injured. Just as Love was the first resident on the scene to lend a helping hand when Southern Soul was engulfed in flames, Sapp and his wife returned the favor, cooking breakfast for the Love family and first responders.
“It was really sad that it happened to him,” Sapp said. “We all sat there and watched it burn.”
But just as Southern Soul came back better than ever, Love has proved he can conquer all. When he speaks of the fire, it doesn’t take long for him to shift the conversation to the outpouring of support his family received.
“I feel so blessed,” he said.
Family keepsakes were lost, but what Love learned to appreciate is that he truly is a beloved member of the community, an island institution every bit as much as the avenue of oaks dripping with moss that stand sentinel at Sea Island’s entranceway, or the bag piper playing at sunset. For Love, this whole island will always be home.
Puttview’s hole-by-hole maps of Sea Island’s Seaside Course provide a peek at the challenges PGA Tour players face this week in Georgia.
Sea Island’s Seaside Course, site of this week’s RSM Classic on the PGA Tour, originally was laid out by famed designers Harry S. Colt and Charles Alison in 1929 and was redesigned by Tom Fazio in 1999.
The event also will be played on the resort’s Plantation Course, which was renovated by Davis Love III in 2019. The first two rounds will be split between the courses, with the final two rounds after the cut being played on Seaside.
The Seaside will play to 7,005 yards with a par of 70 for the RSM Classic, while the Plantation will play to 7,060 yards with a par of 72.
Thanks to yardage books provided by Puttview – the maker of detailed yardage books for more than 30,000 courses around the world – we can see exactly the challenges that players face this week on the Seaside Course. Check out the maps of each hole below.
