Golf Santander

Located a mere 10 minutes from the centre of Spain’s capital city, Golf Santander is the realisation of an idea conceived by Grupo Santander – the third largest bank in Europe – to provide a world-class golfing facility for the bank’s staff. Additionally, Golf Santander meets some of the Bank’s priority environmental objectives.

Part of the site on which the course is routed was an ugly rubbish dump and the aim was to create an ecologically friendly environment for Spain’s rich fauna and flora. Move than five million cubic yards of earth was moved to create the Rees Jones and Seve Ballesteros co-designed Santander and the result is an impressive natural environment and the ideal habitat for hares and red partridge.

Seve Ballesteros commented: "I co-designed this course with Rees Jones and I should point out the great job done in achieving an appealing course in a land with no outstanding features. These are 18 highly versatile holes where the numerous tees produce very demanding holes for professionals also playable by all kinds of players."

The architects have fashioned Santander into an extremely tough and long course which stretches out to almost 7,500 yards from the back tees. It’s one of Spain’s longest courses and provides a demanding test for even the top professionals from the tips but, with six tees from which to choose, Santander is an eminently playable course for golfers of all abilities.

Santander opened for play in 2005 and the tens of thousands of shrubs and 5,000 trees which have been planted need time to mature but the layout is already a fine golfing test and the tee to green conditioning is first class. Key to scoring well here at Santander is to keep on the straight and narrow avoiding the rough and the numerous lakes and streams.