Real Club de Golf Sotogrande

This is where Sotogrande began, and in a sense where modern golf in southern Europe began. It's the first course Robert Trent Jones ever designed on the continent, in the early sixties, and the one that convinced everyone that top-level golf could be built in this corner of Cádiz. It isn't long by today's standards — a par 72 of 6,224 metres — and that's exactly the point: you don't win here by hitting hard. It's a course of strategy, of knowing where to leave the ball for the right angle into the next shot, which is how its designer understood golf. Its achievement is that sixty years later it still works: Top 100 Golf Courses ranks it number 2 in Spain and number 10 in continental Europe, ahead of courses thirty years younger. It sits at the heart of the development, among low houses and mature trees, a step from the marina and the polo grounds.