Top 10 Golf Courses of Kenya 2017
The PGA Baobab course at Vipingo Ridge remains at the top of our newly updated Kenyan rankings
It’s exactly two years since we last updated our Kenyan listings, having just participated in a week-long Magical Kenya golfing safari organised by the Kenya Tourism Board, when we visited half a dozen of the top tracks in the country.
This is the third revision of the chart that we initiated in 2009 and we’ve consulted many of our Kenyan contacts in the golf industry who helped shape the last edition of these rankings so we’re confident that we’re still highlighting the best ten courses in the country, albeit in a slightly different order to last time around.
And so to our updated Top 10 for Kenya and we’ve determined the PGA Baobab course at Vipingo Ridge still retains the number 1 position at the top of the table. Designed by architect David Jones, this layout became the first in Africa to obtain PGA accreditation in October 2016, with Cabinet Secretary Hassan Wario and PGA Head of Property and Development Guy Moran unveiling a plaque at the club to commemorate the achievement.
We were suitably impressed when we played here in 2015, terming it a “very chic, upmarket golf facility” where “the quality of the Vipingo Ridge layout is apparent right from the off.” Admiration for the course conditioning was indeed warranted, but so too was the design, described at the time as “a marvel of engineering (where) water gently cascades down from the highest point on the course to the lower reaches.”
Climbing one place to number 2, the course at Muthaiga Golf Club will host the 48th Kenyan Open next month, a professional event that’s been held here most years since it became part of the European Challenge Tour in 1991. Peter Matkovich renovated the layout in 2004-5 and it’s regarded as one of the prettiest to play in East Africa, particularly on the back nine where several newly constructed lakes now add to the challenge.
Also rising in the chart, up two to number 4, Karen Country Club celebrates its 80th anniversary this year. Laid out across the former coffee plantation of Danish authoress Karen Blixen, whose memoir Out of Africa was published the same year that the club was founded, the greens have recently been renovated under the guidance of architect David Jones and this upgrade certainly met the approval of our in-country panel of advisers, one of whom told us “they are the best I’ve seen at the club in thirty years”.
Two other courses make positive moves up the chart, each of them edging up one place.
At number 7, we have Limuru Country Club – where the prestigious Africa Amateur Team Championships were held in 2015 – and the tree-lined fairways of this mid-1940s course are laid out at an altitude of 7,000 feet above sea level in an area of rolling farmland and tea plantations an hour’s drive north of the capital.
At number 9, the course at the Leisure Lodge Resort lies twenty miles south of Mombasa, close to the shores of the Indian Ocean. As the property consists of nothing more than an array of large coral outcrops, many thousands of tons of soil had to be trucked in to fashion the fairways before the course finally debuted in 1998.
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To view further details of our newly revised Kenya Top 10 rankings click the link.
If you’d like to comment on our newly revised Kenyan listings then please do so via the “Respond to this article” link at the top or bottom of this page. We look forward to receiving feedback whenever we re-rank any of our African national charts so if you have a strong opinion about anything you’re read in this article then feel free to let us know what you’re thinking.
Jim McCann
Editor
Top 100 Golf Courses
