Top Mexican Golf Courses – 2012

22nd January 2012

Top 100 Golf Courses updates Mexico’s golf course rankings

Top 100 Golf Courses, the most informed and dedicated ranking website, established a ranking chart for Mexico in 2009 when we created a list of the Top 15 in the country. This was expanded to twenty courses last year and we’ve now further extended the listings to include twenty-five courses.

We’ve radically overhauled our Mexican chart, incorporating data from several new sources, to produce a ranking list that we now think truly reflects the relative position of golf courses in the land of the sombrero.

No courses drop out from our old table, so there are five new entries to our Top 25. As part of our thorough reappraisal of the position in Mexico, no fewer than sixteen courses have moved downwards with only four remaining in the same position or making an upward move.

The spectacular dune landscape at the southern end of the Baja California Sur Peninsula is a Mexican golfing hotspot – nine of our ranked courses are located here – and it’s where three of the new entries are located.

The first of these is Davis Love III’s dramatic Diamante Dunes course, his first design outside the USA, which goes straight into our rankings at number 1. It’s laid out on a very special site, with holes weaving through lofty sand hills, and observers agree it was one of the very best courses in the world to open in 2010.

Tom Doak’s fantastic new Bahía de los Suenõs course on the east coast of the peninsula has been overshadowed somewhat by the Diamante Dunes layout but it still makes an impressive entry at number 6. It should, in time, rise further if the residential element of the property can be held in check.

Thirty-five miles along the same shoreline, Gary Player’s CostaBaja course makes an appearance in our rankings at the very commendable position of 14, and it too is set to climb higher in due course. Like the Doak layout, it has to reach a favourable balance between golf and housing on an idyllic site overlooking the Sea of Cortez.

Eight courses on the Pacific coast are now included in our Mexican Top 25 and the latest of these is the Bahia course at the Four Seasons Punta Mita Resort, one of two Jack Nicklaus-designed layouts at this location. The Golden Bear’s course makes an entry into our listing at number 12.

The fifth and final new entry is situated to the east side of Mexico on the Yucatán Peninsula, not far from the popular tourist trap of Cancun. Playa Paraiso is a P.B. Dye creation that opened in 2005 and it’s a something of a thinking person’s course that calls for far more smart play than you might expect at a resort. It makes an appearance in the Mexican standings at number 22.

We always welcome feedback at Top 100 Golf Courses so please feel free to let us know what you think of our golf course coverage in Mexico – are there other courses that we really should be featuring, or is there not enough quality to justify further expansion?

Top 100 doesn’t claim to be “definitive” but we like to think that we’re the most “informed” golf course ranking operation in the industry. If you’ve played one of our featured courses in Mexico, we’d love to find out what you think of it, so why not post us a course review?

Jim McCann
Editor
www.top100golfcourses.com

Click here to examine the Mexican Top 25 in greater detail