Jutting out into the Caspian Sea, the Absheron Peninsula is where you’ll find Dreamland Golf Club located, a mere 20-minute drive from the Azerbaijani capital city Baku.
Jutting out into the Caspian Sea, the Absheron Peninsula is where you’ll find Dreamland Golf Club located, a mere 20-minute drive from the Azerbaijani capital city Baku.
Jutting out into the Caspian Sea, the Absheron Peninsula is where you’ll find Dreamland Golf Club located, a mere 20-minute drive from the capital city Baku. The IMG-operated course is the centerpiece of a premier gated community which officially debuted in October 2015 when President Ilham Aliyev and Colin Montgomerie cut the ribbon to open the facility.
Speaking about the resort, Montgomerie said, “I’ve been to hundreds of golf courses in my career and this golf club and complex truly is right up there. From the quality of the course and villas at the resort to the hospitality in the clubhouse, the facility ticks all of the boxes. It’s really exciting to see golf being pushed to new territories such as Azerbaijan.”
With five tee options, the overall length of the course varies from the forward tee positions at the 4,736-metre mark to 6,838 metres from the championship tees. Dreamland is set out as two convenient nine hole circuits with holes routed around ten lakes and fairway perimeters landscaped with olives trees, bringing something of a Mediterranean feel to the Caucuses.
The par threes are particularly challenging. There’s water in play at each of these holes, which is intimidating enough, but the sweeping beach bunkers that line the lakes in front of these greens just seem to add another level of anxiety when standing on the tee. Baku is also known as a windy city so when it’s blowing a bit this can be a very testing track.
Because the clubhouse is quite a way from the golf academy building, where most golfers naturally start their round at the current 1st hole, the playing sequence may be altered soon so that a stipulated round begins at what is presently the par four 13th and ends at the par five 12th.
Top 10 Golf Courses of Egypt 2013 Top 100 Golf Courses extends its Egyptian rankings for 2013 7th March 2013 Following multiple visits to North Africa by the Top 100 Team in 2012, we expanded our coverage of golf in Morocco and Tunisia by creating a ranking list of ten courses in each country. A year on, we've now decided to further enhance our profile of golf courses in the region with the formation of the first ever Top 10 list for Egypt. Golf has been played in the country for almost 100 years. Indeed, clubs like Gezira Sporting Club and Alexandria Sporting Club were actually established in the 1880s. The courses attached to these old clubs – along with the 9-hole Mena House layout that sits right next to the Giza pyramids – are wonderful throwbacks to the game of golf as the occupying British forces originally played it almost a century ago. Sadly, none of these three grand old courses feature in our Egyptian Top 10 rankings but that's not to say they should be completely disregarded if you're looking for a more traditional game when visiting the country. Largely neglected by today's golfer, these antiquated courses are capable of providing more than a modicum of golfing pleasure for the more discerning player. It wasn't until the 1990s that modern golf development really began in the country with the support of the Ministry of Tourism and the Egyptian Golf Federation. Most of these new courses are now located in and around the capital with the remainder clustered along the western shores of the Red Sea or – in the case of Taba Heights and Jolie Ville – on the more remote Sinai Peninsula. We produced our original five course ranking list a few years ago when it consisted of the John Sanford-designed 18-hole layout at Taba Heights, which opened in 2007, along with four courses that were built during the preceding decade: Gary Player's Red Sea offering, Cascades at Soma Bay, and three courses situated close to Cairo: Katameya Heights (Yves Bureau), Mirage City (Peter Harradine) and Dreamland (Karl Litten). All five courses remain in our expanded list of ten and they've now been joined by the following new millennium layouts: Stella Di Mare (Karl Litten), El Ein Bay (Thomson Perrett & Lobb) and Madinat Makadi (John Sanford) from the Red Sea resorts and – closer to Cairo – Katameya Dunes (Nick Faldo with Brian Curley and Lee Schmidt) and Greg Norman's The Allegria, which is the undisputed new national number one. As to the future, despite the current political and economic upheaval in the country, architect John Sanford has informed us of two major projects that he's currently involved in. The first of these, Palm Hills, is a joint venture with Nicklaus Design that's due to open later this year whilst construction of the other golf complex at Hacienda Bay, on the North Coast, is well under way. If you have already teed it up at any of our Egyptian Top 10 then please feel free to send us a review or a photo of any course that you have played. To view our new Egyptian rankings in detail, click here. Jim McCann Editor www.top100golfcourses.com
The latest ranking of the Top 100 Golf Courses in the World serves as the ultimate global golf bucket list. Most members of our World Top 100 Panel are seasoned golfers, each playing 20-30 of these courses annually while travelling extensively over decades to form their opinions on others. We recognise that opinions vary—even among our panel members. Rankings are subjective, and there are undoubtedly 50 or more courses in the UK and USA alone that could easily fit onto this list. Links Golf Pilgrimages The rankings
California, United States
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New York, United States
