The booming golf destination of Cabo San Lucas has grown a little bigger with the opening of the Greg Norman-designed Rancho San Lucas Golf Club, a dramatic layout that features five holes on the beach and the Pacific Ocean as a backdrop.
While it’s the 17th golf course in “Cabo,” Rancho San Lucas offers a number of unique elements, including the lone island green in the region – the par-3 17th – and the only revetted bunkers in all of Mexico. In this case, recycled artificial turf pieces were stacked to create the faces of these bunkers, which are designed to withstand wind erosion.
Norman also embraced a “least-disturbance” approach in his design to keep the course as natural as possible while showcasing the property’s three unique ecosystems: the ocean, the sand dunes and the arroyos.
“Rancho San Lucas is the most spectacular piece of oceanfront property I’ve seen in a long time, so to have the opportunity to build a course on this site was truly once-in-a-lifetime,” said Norman, who has 105 other course designs around the world.
Rancho San Lucas is located within the 834-acre resort and residential community of the same name, where luxury beachfront homes on the tip of the Baja Peninsula range from $650,000 to $7 million. While the golf club is private, it is open to homeowners and guests of Solmar Hotels & Resorts, including the on-site luxury hotel, Grand Solmar at Rancho San Lucas.
The course, which features 300 feet of elevation change and five sets of tees on every hole, has both of its nines circulate through the uplands desert and its arroyos, but the beach is a prominent presence as well. The par-3 third hole parallels the Pacific and offers players spectacular views of breaching whales during the winter months.
Developer Francisco Bulnes says Norman’s clearing of the course and preservation efforts were a special touch in preserving the natural feel. At the start of the project, Norman informed Bulnes that his design team would only clear the fairway corridors 10 meters at a time.
“Most designers mass clear a site and then attempt to re-vegetate it later. Not Greg. He was very careful to remove specimen trees and plants and shelter them in a nursery,” Bulnes says. “He wanted to work at a very slow rate, so he could evaluate the site’s contours and build the course in an environmentally responsible way. This took several months, but that’s what his ‘least-disturbance’ design philosophy is all about: keep earth-moving to a minimum, and step as lightly as possible on nature’s toes.”
Wind is frequently a factor in Los Cabos, hence not only the stacked-wall bunkers but the 12-hole short course (par-49) that allows participants to play only low-lying holes that are sheltered by the dunes and shielded from ocean breezes. This 4,964-yard layout will no doubt be a popular choice for guests and outings during the windiest days in May.
Located 15 miles from downtown Cabo San Lucas, Rancho San Lucas also boasts two $600,000 on-course comfort stations, also known as “Shark Shacks,” that are strategically placed for multiple visits. Each provides Mexican specialties as well as Cerveza and other ice-cold refreshments, but it’s truly the golf course itself that’s most unforgettable, even in a region chock-full of terrific offerings.
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