Maioris - Balearic Islands - Spain

The first time I visited Maioris in October 2016 the course was in such awful shape that one ball would have been too much! The manager immediately gave us vouchers to come back and play for free. Have now just been back and experienced some of the course conditions that Jim McCann describes in his review below ....I think I am in a position to deliver a balanced verdict. 1) The course is long and not very wide, so avoid playing it from far back if it is wet or if you happen to be spreading it from the tee on that particular day, 2) greens are recovering from an awful state, but seem to be dominated by poa annua, so conditioning is probably going to be better early in the morning and it remains to be seen if the course can manage through the hot Mallorcan summer and still be decent in the autumn, 3) the course is currently not very busy in the afternoons so the layout which takes you to the clubhouse after 14 and 16 lends encourages fast match-play, which is otherwise a rarity on Mallorca.

With conditioning this variable, it is hard to recommend, but perhaps worth taking a chance if you stay nearby and can go to check conditions yourself before deciding to play.

I've just come back from a trip to Majorca and played this course.

I know it is winter there but the course was in a sorry state. The greens were a patchwork of repairs and the whole place seemed unkempt and in need of TLC. Although there were some interesting holes in design I shall not be going back.

Maioris was a bit of a pleasant surprise. It didn’t feature prominently in any of the golf websites I checked before travelling to Mallorca so I was expecting a rather dull, resort-style layout, built by a German professional who’d know little about good architecture. Well, how wrong can you get? This was a terrific track where I could put up with the nonsensical island-green 4th and daft lake-laden 10th because the other sixteen holes (and the greens in particular) were of a very high standard. I was amazed that this place is less than ten years old as it had the feel of a long-established course, with hard and fast fairways leading to small, beautifully-contoured greens, some of which were two-tiered, like the 7th and 18th. In short, Maioris displayed a surprising array of links-like characteristics, which is probably what endeared me so much to the course! The par five 5th has to be one of the most deceptive putting surfaces I’ve ever played to as you’d never believe how far the left to right slope of the green could possibly deflect your approach shot away from the pin. There’s brilliant use of a small escarpment that runs across the course, with greens on the 7th, 9th, 14th, 16th and 18th set along the edge of the ridge, forcing golfers to play an exacting uphill approach shot. Of course, the first four of those uphill holes are then followed by a thrilling downhill tee shot from an elevated tee position at the next hole, so there’s half the course taken care of with clever use of just one natural feature. Apart from the silly aforementioned holes 4 and 10, a further four holes have water featured on the back nine but all of these are sensible, especially the short par four 12th and par three 13th, located in a strip of land that juts out somewhat incongruously from the property in its the south east corner. Looking back now, it’s so nice to remember walking off the 18th green, delighted to have played a course that you’d had no expectations for. Jim McCann.