Mirage City

Peter Harradine was the architect behind the 18-hole championship layout at Mirage City in the late 1990s – returning a decade later to add a 9-hole par 32 executive layout – and his design company has been very busy in recent times with another couple of large scale Egyptian projects at Uptown Cairo, close to the capital city and Marassi, near Alamein on the Mediterranean coast.

With ponds and streams in play at nearly every hole, golfers must be switched on right from the first tee shot, otherwise a substantial number of golf balls will find a watery grave during the round. By way of leveling out the hazards, bunkering around the greens is light – but, of course, that slight concession to protecting par is only relevant if preceding shots have remained dry and in play.

Feature holes on the card include the 578-yard 8th (a par five with water running down the entire right side of the fairway and a large lake that threatens the approach shot to the green) and the 167-yard 12th (a downhill par three that plays over water to a green with a large rock wall surrounding the back of the hole).

In October 2010, the European Challenge Tour came to town for the Egyptian Open – a competition dating back to 1921 – and among the players competing at Mirage City was the then world number 9 ranked player, Rory McIlroy. Unhappily for him, he couldn’t match Mark Tullo’s winning score of twelve under par for the event.