La Cala (America) - Southern Spain - Spain

La Cala Golf Club has overtaken La Manga in southeast Spain as the largest golf resort in the country. In addition to the three championship 18-hole courses here, there is a 6-hole par three practice course, Golf Academy and a 107-room hotel on site.

Located at the foot of the Mijas mountains, slightly inland from the Costa del Sol between Marbella and Malaga, the original Campo America was known as the North course when it opened in 1990 (just after the South course – now the Campo Asia).

The America and Asia layouts were two of the first projects undertaken by the American golf course architect Cabell B. Robinson after he moved from the Robert Trent Jones company and he has since added a third course, Campo Europa, in 2005.

There are many changes in elevation on the hilly, par 72, America course with many of the Pencross grass greens raised above the level of the Bermuda grass fairways. Strategic sand bunkering – crushed marble filled traps, in fact – add to the degree of difficulty.

The round starts and ends with a par five – there are five of these in total – and the course measures a respectable 6,547 yards from the back tees. Many consider the best hole to be the 135-yard, short par three 16th where the elevated tee overlooks the whole property and the view extends over the pond in front of the green, past the putting surface to the coast several miles away.

Cabell B. Robinson, course architect, commented as follows: “The campo America course was laid out at the same time as Campo Asia, but construction and the course opening were a year or so later. There was far greater change in elevation across the America site and in this regard it was the more difficult of the two sites on which to create an acceptable course routing. The result is some topographically spectacular holes, notably numbers 6, 9 and 18 – all par 5s – and the photogenic par 3 16th. Nearly 20 years later I am still rather proud of what I was able to achieve there at the outset of my solo career.”