Noordwijkse Golf Club

The Low Countries offer some of Continental Europe's finest golf, where Golden Age masterpieces from Harry Colt and Tom Simpson showcase world-class architecture across remarkably compact geography. From the towering dunes of Dutch links courses to Belgium's tree-lined royal estates, the Benelux region delivers diverse golfing experiences within easy reach of major airports. The Netherlands leads with 40 exceptional courses headlined by Utrecht De Pan's heathland masterpiece. Belgium counters with 30 superb layouts dominated by royal courses carrying century-old heritage. Luxembourg rounds out the trio with three quality courses in one of Europe's smallest nations. 🇳🇱 Best Golf Courses in The Netherlands The Elite Five 🏆 The Netherlands' premier golf courses showcase the finest Golden Age architecture in Continental Europe. These five courses represent the absolute pinnacle of Dutch golf: 1. Utrecht De Pan – Harry Colt carved this heathland masterpiece through magnificent pine, birch and oak forests in the late 1920s. Ranked 56th in the world, the course presents strategic golf where holes flow naturally across gently rolling terrain. Frank Pont's recent restoration work has returned the layout to its original glory, removing decades of vegetation to reveal Colt's intended playing corridors. 2. Koninklijke Haagsche (Royal Hague) – This links layout weaves through towering sand dunes along the North Sea coast. Originally redesigned by Harry Colt's partner Hugh Alison just before World War II, the course ranks 86th globally and second in Continental Europe. Recent reviews compare its rolling duneland to Shinnecock Hills, high praise for any course outside traditional links strongholds. 3. Kennemer – Harry Colt's 1927 design near Amsterdam offers another links experience, later expanded by Frank Pennink in the 1980s with an additional nine holes. The sandy-soiled fairways and firm conditions provide authentic seaside golf just minutes from Schiphol Airport. 4. Eindhovensche – Another Harry Colt masterpiece from the Golden Age, this woodland course winds through dense forest south of Eindhoven. Recent tree removal has reclaimed lost width and improved turf conditions, showcasing Colt's original strategic intent. 5. Noordwijkse – Coastal links golf at its finest, this layout offers firm turf and natural movement between The Hague and Haarlem. The course held the Netherlands' top ranking in 2014 before being overtaken by the resurgent courses above it. Modern Excellence ⬆️ Beyond the Golden Age classics, exceptional modern courses prove great architecture continues: 🏖️ Links Valley – Modern links-style layout emphasising firm, fast conditions and strategic ground game 🏆 Bernardus – Kyle Phillips masterpiece hosting multiple KLM Open championships ✈️ The International Amsterdam – Bruno Steensels championship venue near Schiphol Airport Regional Character 🗺️ The Hague Coastal Zone 🌊 – Koninklijke Haagsche and Noordwijkse provide the Netherlands' finest links golf with towering dunes and firm conditions. Utrecht Heathland 🌲 – Utrecht De Pan anchors the region where courses thread through pine forests with year-round firm playing conditions. Amsterdam Gateway 🏙️ – Kennemer and The International offer championship golf within 30 minutes of Schiphol Airport. 🇧🇪 Best Golf Courses in Belgium The Royal Elite 👑 Belgium's finest courses carry impressive royal pedigrees, most earning the "Royal" designation automatically after fifty years of operation. The top courses showcase British Golden Age architecture adapted to Belgian terrain: 1. Royal Antwerp – Belgium's oldest club (founded 1888) now holds the nation's top ranking. Tom Simpson redesigned Willie Park Jr's original routing in 1930, creating a wooded heathland classic. Recent intensive tree management has restored the course to Simpson's vision, opening vistas and improving playing conditions dramatically. 2. Royal Zoute – Harry Colt's 1907 links layout near the North Sea coast held Belgium's #1 ranking for years. Eight Belgian Open championships have been contested here, with Lee Westwood capturing the last edition in 2000. 3. Royal Limburg – Fred Hawtree designed this heathland course in the mid-1960s, with son Martin later refining the layout. Recent bunker renovation by Bruno Steensels has enhanced both aesthetics and playability. The course extends to over 6,000 metres with strategic demands throughout. 4. Royal Belgium (Old) – Originally laid out by Seymour Dunn over a century ago, Tom Simpson redesigned this tree-lined layout in 1928. Martin Hawtree's 1990s renovation modernised the course whilst respecting Simpson's strategic architecture. The 27-hole facility near Brussels includes a complementary nine-hole short course. 5. Royal Ostend – Belgium's only true links course offers seaside golf along the North Sea. The relatively flat terrain creates different challenges than the rolling dunes found in the Netherlands, but the coastal wind and firm conditions deliver authentic links golf. Championship Tests 🏆 Royal Waterloo (La Marache) – This championship layout consistently ranks among Belgium's finest courses. Strong conditioning and strategic design create a proper tournament test that has hosted numerous professional events. National Golf Brussels (Championship) – Opening in 2017, this modern facility immediately gained recognition for its championship-quality design and extensive practice facilities. Belgian professional stars Nicolas Colsaerts, Thomas Detry and Thomas Pieters endorsed the course at its launch. Tom Simpson's Belgian Legacy 🏛️ Tom Simpson's influence on Belgian golf towers above all other architects. Three top courses bear his design signature: Royal Antwerp – 1930 redesign now fully restored to original intent Royal Fagnes – 1930 partnership with Philip Mackenzie Ross in Spa Royal Sart Tilman – 1939 design through dramatic topography near Liège Simpson's work across varied Belgian terrain, from dense forest to open parkland, created courses that have stood the test of time. His understanding of strategic golf and natural land movement produced layouts that remain relevant nearly a century later. Regional Distribution 🗺️ Belgium's top courses cluster in four regions: Antwerp (Royal Antwerp in the north), Coastal Strip (Royal Zoute and Royal Ostend along the North Sea), Brussels Area (Royal Belgium, Royal Waterloo, National Brussels around the capital), and Ardennes Mountains (Royal Fagnes and Royal Sart Tilman in the southeast). 🇱🇺 Best Golf Courses in Luxembourg Luxembourg's compact size means just three courses dominate the national scene: 1. Golf de Luxembourg – Located within a 400-acre estate in the hilly, forested Grevenmachar district, the course routes around the beautiful 18th-century Belenhaff château. The layout provides a pleasant golf experience that mirrors Luxembourg itself – quality in compact scale. 2. Grand Ducal de Luxembourg – Golf in Luxembourg started here in 1935, making this the nation's oldest course. Originally designed by Major J.C. Symonds with inspiration from Tom Simpson (who was working nearby in Belgium), the venerable layout maintains historic significance. 3. Kikuoka – Japanese architect Iwao Uematsu designed this course in 1991 within the 250-acre Scheierhaff Estate for the Kikuoka family. The club added a unique six-hole short course in 2008 featuring synthetic sand-filled greens, rare in Continental European golf. Planning Your Benelux Golf Trip ✈️ Coastal Links Tour (2 days) 🌊 Experience Dutch seaside golf across Koninklijke Haagsche, Noordwijkse and Kennemer – all within 80 kilometres along the North Sea coast. Base in The Hague or Haarlem. Heathland Heritage Tour (2 days) 🌲 Play Utrecht De Pan, Hilversumsche and Lage Vuursche through pine forests and sandy heathland. This 40-kilometre triangle uses Utrecht as its base. Belgium's Royal Circuit (2 days) 👑 Experience Royal Antwerp, Royal Zoute, Royal Limburg and Royal Belgium across Belgium's finest courses, all within two hours' drive. Brussels makes an excellent base. Complete Benelux Experience (7+ days) 🗓️ Fly into Amsterdam Schiphol. Play two days of Dutch coastal links (Koninklijke Haagsche, Noordwijkse, Kennemer), two days of heathland classics (Utrecht De Pan, Hilversumsche), one day of modern championship golf (Bernardus or The International), then cross into Belgium for Royal Antwerp and Royal Zoute. Why These Courses Matter 🎯 The Low Countries preserve Golden Age architecture from Harry Colt and Tom Simpson that has stood the test of time. The Netherlands maintains two courses in the World Top 100, whilst several Belgian courses rank within Continental Europe's elite. Major international airports at Amsterdam and Brussels provide easy access, with excellent motorways making multi-course trips efficient. Most top courses sit within two hours of major airports. Year-round play is possible thanks to sandy soil and modern drainage, with late spring through early autumn offering peak conditions. What Makes These Courses Special 🎓 Links Golf 🌊 – True links courses remain rare on the continent. The Netherlands offers the finest examples at Koninklijke Haagsche, Noordwijkse and Kennemer, featuring firm turf and natural dune movement. Heathland Golf 🌲 – Dutch heathland courses through pine forests like Utrecht De Pan showcase sandy soil, heather-lined fairways and strategic bunkering that create year-round firm conditions. Restoration Success 🌳 – Recent tree removal at courses like Royal Antwerp demonstrates how returning to original design intent elevates golf courses dramatically. The Best Golf Courses: A Summary 📝 The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg deliver world-class golf architecture across compact geography. Utrecht De Pan's heathland excellence, Royal Antwerp's restored Simpson masterpiece and Belgium's royal courses offer layouts worth crossing an ocean to experience. The region succeeds through architectural heritage preservation and recognition that Golden Age designs remain relevant a century later. For international visitors, the Benelux region provides efficient multi-course itineraries with minimal travel between world-class courses. The best golf courses in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg await.

The Top 100 Team caught up with David Davis Co-founder of LockHart Travel Club to discuss another awesome trip to The Netherlands. “A group of Lockhart members ventured to the little known but very underrated golf country of The Netherlands. Known for windmills, tulips, wooden shoes and more than its fair share of rain, this little country packs a serious punch when it comes to World Class Golf”. The Netherlands, the flattest country in the world…until you play golf. With most of our members arriving on Saturday to recoup and refresh, we indulged in a private canal tour through none other than the majestic canals of Amsterdam. Debating golf, golf courses and golf architecture for a couple hours while enjoying some cold drinks on our classic salon boat. We all agreed that life in that moment was pretty darn special with several days of World Class golf to follow. Sunday, we left Amsterdam for a short 30 minute drive up the coast to Noordwijk aan Zee, home of the Noordwijkse Golf Club. No need to try and pronounce it, we offered assistance in that prior to arrival. With rain the entire morning we’d prepared the group for a wet and very windy day. The disappointment could be sensed when the skies opened shortly after we teed off and the sun and wind served up a magical afternoon. Noordwijkse has just approved a long awaited and complete renovation which includes 3 completely new holes with new greens and surrounds befitting a world class links course. Martin Ebert is the architect of choice, and the club is hoping for improvements the likes of Turnberry and Portrush. Miraculously, this set the tone for the week and the Golf Gods were most certainly on our side. To top off the day, that night we dined in one of the best fish restaurants in Amsterdam, Vis a/d Schelde, a perfect day! Monday morning we jumped into the van for the 1.5 hour trek to the Eindhovensche Golf Club which sits down south near the Belgium border. The rain had reached biblical proportions during the night and the club was closed. Luckily we know some important people at the club there and they called ahead to the superintendent and reminded them that the Lockhart gentlemen were on the way. The positive answer came as we were already underway. They would open the course for us at 12:30 pm. The biblical rains followed us for most the trip down. 30 minutes out it was dry and remained so until we were sitting with beers on the 19th hole. Our best guess, the boys from Florida, Spain and The Bahamas brought some good weather karma along. Eindhovensche is a classic Harry Colt design where the club is working extensively to remove trees and open up vistas on the course as well as regenerate heather. A strong routing, it also has a pair of truly all-world golf holes in the short, drivable par 4 second and the short par 4, 5th hole. Tuesday was to be a very special day with a visit to the World Top 100 – Koninklijke Haagsche Golf and Country Club. One of C.H. Alison’s legacies to the golf world, Hirono and Kawana widely considered the others. Note, if it’s not obvious, the name was chosen because of its strong international marketing potential. Needless to say, nobody passed the preparatory pronunciation training on this one. Royal Hague as most of the world knows it, is a wild ride and truly one of the most undulated walking courses you will find anywhere. That starts with the steep uphill hike from the club house to the starters hut at the first tee. By the time you reach the third fairway, your daily hill climb workout can be checked off and unless you are a mountain goat your legs will be burning. This wild ride continues from start to finish with blind shots, few flat lies, crowned greens and plenty of wind to contend with. Utrechtse Golfclub de Pan is one of our favorite courses on the entire European continent and it would be very difficult to dream up a more fitting setting and wonderful course to end our NL adventure. De Pan as locals call it, has also been ranked well inside the World Top 100 for a number of years now. World class golf holes are a dime a dozen at De Pan which benefits from one of Harry Colt’s best routings on a tight little property. The stretch of holes from the double blind shot par 4, 6th right on through to the reachable par 5, 18th could hold its own in any argument for the best 13 hole stretch of golf holes on the planet. Needless to say, the entire group left wanting to go straight back out for another go. That’s about the best we could ask for. Register Your Member Application with Lockhart Travel Club With plenty of golf on the horizon for 2024, join our next adventure and sign up for one of our great upcoming trips today! Click Here to Learn More About Lockhart Travel Club

The Netherlands – a golf destination of surprising high quality We spend five days visiting some of the old (and not so old) Dutch Masters In June of 2016, three of the UK-based Top 100 Team joined our Nordic correspondent Jan Nordstrom for a very entertaining week-long tour of top golf courses in Sweden, based around Malmö in the south of the country. This year, our International correspondent David Davis invited the same group to The Netherlands, his adopted country, to sample several of the old Dutch Masters that aren’t widely known beyond the polders of the Low Countries. We were scheduled to play the current top seven courses in the country, all of which are ranked in our Continental Europe Top 100, so we suspected we were in for a golfing treat even before we touched down in Amsterdam, where we were based for most of the trip. The Netherlands doesn’t promote itself as a golfing destination via any of its tourism websites – though you’ll read plenty about food, arts & culture, cycling etc – so you really need to dig deep to find what you’re looking for. First up on the itinerary was David’s home club at Noordwijkse, which lies on the North Sea coast, around 45 minutes south west of downtown Amsterdam. Although the club is more than a hundred years old, the course is less than half that vintage, having been set out by Frank Pennink through towering dunes and a woodland of pine trees in the early 1970s. It was displaced at the head of the Netherlands national rankings when we re-sequenced the chart at the start of last year but that fall was all about other courses improving, rather than Noordwijkse deteriorating. Next stop was the current national number 1, Koninklijke Haagsche, situated 20 kilometres further along the coastline. The club dates back to 1893 but the course is a little younger, having been laid out in 1939 by the famous architectural firm of Colt, Alison and Morrison for Stuart Wolf, a wealthy merchant. Royal Hague acquired the property after World War II and brought in Sir Guy Campbell to ready the course for play again. It’s a thrilling roller coaster of a golf ride from start to finish and one that will last in the memory for a very long time indeed. Day two of the tour saw us move inland, to Utrecht and then to Eindhoven. We were joined at Utrechtse Golf Club de Pan in the morning by architect Frank Pont, who was kind enough to walk most of the front nine with our group, pointing out a number of course improvements that he’s made recently. Another late 1920s design from Colt, Alison and Morrison, the course occupies a compact tract of wooded heathland, where only a masterful routing would have allowed an eighteen-hole course to be set out in such a comfortable fashion. For so long an unheralded track, de Pan is now talked about by those in the know as one of the best in Europe. In the afternoon, we took the opportunity to play Frank Pont’s Championship 18-hole layout at Golfbaan de Swinkelsche and this modern course, which only opened for play five years ago, certainly provoked lots of discussion along the way – especially at the short par four 11th, which offers multiple routes to the green over or around a large sandy waste area facing the tee box. Because the landscape in this area is relatively flat, most of the bunkers are big and bold, adding visual interest all the way around the course. Golfers with an open mind who come to play here will find the course thoroughly engaging, of that there is no doubt. It seemed like a good idea to take something of a break half way through the schedule, so the following morning was spent on a visit to the latest Kyle Phillips design that’s still being constructed at Cromvoirt, to the north of Eindhoven. Dave Smith, Kyle’s shaper of many years, and Graeme Rutjes, the project manager (and former defender with the Netherlands football team at the time of Italia ’90), showed us around the site on a couple of buggies. The fescue fairways are being built on sand, heather is being extensively transplanted and no expense has been spared with a multi-million-euro budget. The clubhouse and practice facilities also look like they're top spec, so expect to hear quite a bit about this place when it opens next year – and remember where you read about it first. Fifty kilometres to the south, on the other side of Eindhoven, lies Eindhovensche Golf Club, our next golfing port of call in the afternoon. According to the club’s “caddie book,” the wide expanse of heathland named “Nederheide” was purchased by Mr and Mrs Philips-de Jong in the late 1920s. The Colt, Alison and Morrison design company was commissioned to layout the course and the inaugural golf games were played in the autumn of 1929, with the club officially founded the following year. Nothing much seems to have changed since then, which is not to say the track is stuck in a time warp as it’s under constant revision, but there’s a real feeling of stepping back in time when you tee it up here. The penultimate day of the golfing excursion was spent close to the media city of Hilversum, with an early start at Golfsociëteit De Lage Vuursche. It’s a very modern layout, officially co-designed by Kyle Phillips and Robert Trent Jones Jnr (though there’s a story behind why RTJII is on the architectural credits) with a chic clubhouse to complement the water-laden 18-hole course. Conditioning is second to none here, leading some to possibly think it looks and feels like playing a top-end track in the sunshine state of Florida – that’s not to be dismissed as a disparaging statement, instead it indicates the very high quality of a golf facility that’s not short of members prepared to pay a considerable joining fee and substantial annual green fees. In the afternoon, the short 15-minute drive to Hilversumsche Golf Club transported us to a completely different landscape, even though it was located only ten kilometres away. The course is laid out on rolling heathland, with tree-lined fairways arranged in two distinct tracts of land that are located in adjacent provinces. The course was extended to an 18-hole layout by Colt, Alison and Morrison in the late 1920s then modified by Sir Guy Campbell thirty years later. Kyle Phillips has carried out some modifications in recent times to strengthen the challenge and ensure it’s fit for purpose in the modern era. And so to the final day of the trip and it was back to the seaside, where it had all kicked off four days earlier. Kennemer Golf & Country Club is situated just outside Zandvoort, close to the famous motor racing circuit, and the club has operated here since 1927 when (yes, you’ve guessed) Colt, Alison and Morrison Ltd. set out two 9-hole circuits in the sandhills surrounding the clubhouse. Frank Pennink added a further 9-hole loop in 1985 (using a routing designed by Harry Colt from sixty years earlier) so the club now offers twenty-seven holes of fabulous links golf to members and visitors alike. The names Colt, Alison & Morrison Ltd., Pennink, Pont and Phillips all loom large in the courses visited on this trip and that’s not a coincidence. The former company shaped most of the Golden Age layouts in the Netherlands which endure to this day whilst the latter three are responsible for building many of the modern-day designs in the country, or remodelling the old classic layouts to keep pace with play in the new millennium. It stands to reason that if you want to see the best courses then these architects will all feature at some point during your tour. Looking back to twelve months ago, venturing north to Sweden in search of great golf was a wise decision and the Netherlands this year has at least matched that wonderful experience. The question now is where should we be heading to in 2018 to top those two countries? Is there a case perhaps to be made for the likes of Belgium, France or Germany, or maybe one of the emerging central European nations like Poland or the Czech Republic? Suggestions gratefully received, so please fire away by using the “Respond to this article” link at the top or at the bottom of this page. Jim McCann Editor Top 100 Golf Courses