Vejer de la Frontera · Cádiz
What you don't expect is the view. From the course you can see Vejer de la Frontera perched on its hill, the Atlantic, the coast of Tangier and Cape Spartel, all at once. The course sits wedged between two protected areas — the La Breña Natural Park and the Barbate river marshes — and deer, fallow deer and mouflon roam the estate. That's not a figure of speech: they cross your path. It's played inside an estate of more than five hundred hectares of dehesa woodland, and it shows hole by hole: among pines, wild olives and centuries-old cork oaks, with wide fairways and several ways into each green. Alejandro Maldonado designed it and it opened in 1996. And in the middle of the course there's art. The NMAC Foundation is an open-air contemporary art museum, with pieces scattered through the woods. The estate is also a leading European equestrian centre: every February it hosts the Sunshine Tour, with over seven hundred riders from forty-six countries, right in the middle of golf season.
The buggy is included here, which is welcome. At Montenmedio the buggy comes with the package, something no other course in the catalogue does. On a five-hundred-hectare estate it isn't a luxury: it's how you see all of it without finishing the round dragging your feet.
Would rather play it from another hotel, or in another combination? Tell us and we'll put together a firm-priced proposal.