I recently made a trip to South Eastern Spain. An interesting golfing experience, very different to my usual preferred brand of remoter/rustic GB&I courses.
As I'd not been to the area before I wanted to play a few courses of differing character and differing pricing, as although the flights to get there might be cheap, the cost of playing top-end golf in Spain is anything but. Having also seen plenty of magazine photos of Spanish courses built on what seemed pretty extreme terrain, I wanted to experience them at firsthand.
Ignoring the golf itself and any comparisons to the sort of classic courses regularly discussed herein, the aspect that really intrigued me was the routing and course construction of some of the hilly courses, and they are hilly, really hilly, buggy or no play style, mountain goat territory, with what looked like very poor soil too and not much rain water either.
Below are a few general photos. The courses are Calanova and La Cala. The former I played, and was a laugh a minute, crazy hoot of the once in a lifetime never to be forgotten variety. The latter, which is a bit more upmarket, I just walked around parts of. I also played some flatter courses, the best being San Roque New, which I thought very fine indeed. Much flatter than the two mentioned above, indeed very walkable, and although very different to my usual slightly rural rustic GB&I favourites, nevertheless thoroughly enjoyable. I'll post some photos of SR-N in due course. I didn't play any of the main big name courses in the area, the Valderama's and Sotogrande's etc, there greenfee's being far too high.
As I mentioned above, it's the routing/construction/maintenance aspects of courses like these that intrigue me so if anyone could throw some light on the processes involved in laying out, building and maintaining courses on such terrain it would be appreciated.
I'd also like to mention the grass type. No idea of it's name but several of the courses I played had think, clingy style of grass for the fairways and rough - the ball would sit up nicely, but there was no roll on a shot to the extent that the chase and bounce game was out of the question. What grass type would this have been? SR-N had different grasses, so roll and chase was possible.
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As you can see, hundreds of feet of elevation change.
Many terraced holes.
Continuous change in height.
Apartments on some of the surrounding hillsides - mostly unoccupied, such is the present economic situation
Below - photo taken from above the 18th green at Calanova. The slope from the green up the clubhouse is ski-slope like.
Below - a general photo La Cala
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