Old Quarry

The Old Quarry Golf Course at the Santa Barbara Plantation lies close to Mount Tafelberg, a craggy slab of limestone where they still mine marble in the southeast corner of Curaçao. It’s an integral part of a resort development that Jack Marshall of the VIDA Group is delivering to owner Christopher Smeets of SFT Investments Limited.

When Pete Dye constructed Teeth of the Dog forty years previously, he faced challenges with a local workforce that knew nothing about constructing a golf course. Over time, the workers learned what needed to be done from a couple of experienced shapers and it was a similar story here in Curaçao where locals were trained, for instance, to mix their own topsoil in order to supplement the existing arid, rocky landscape.

And because water is such a scarce commodity, a state of the art irrigation system was installed to use effluent from an on-site treatment plant, mixed with salt water and fresh water from a reverse osmosis system, to irrigate the paspalum grasses on the course.

The round at Old Quarry begins alongside the Caribbean Sea where the opening three holes play along the coast to the south of the property before the course turns northwards for a couple of holes.

The fairways between the short par four 6th and the 396-yard 9th sit next to the Seru Boca Marina in Spanish Water but this, unfortunately, is where the nautical proximity of the layout ends as the back nine is routed inland, around a couple of housing developments.