Where to Play
Best Golf Courses in Miami
Older than the skyline, and mostly public.
Miami golf is not what visitors expect. The courses here are older than the skyline, several were built before the war, and the best of them sit on land nobody would be allowed to build on today. Fifteen courses inside the county, and the good ones are almost all public.
1. Crandon Golf at Key Biscayne
Crandon is municipal golf on an island paradise ten minutes from downtown. Robert von Hagge and Bruce Devlin built it in 1972; von Hagge came back in 1993 to rebuild the greens and bunkering.
Seven saltwater lakes, mangrove thickets and holes looking out over Biscayne Bay. Crocodiles, iguanas, herons and ibis are part of the round. There is nothing else like it in American public golf.
2. The Biltmore
The Biltmore is a 1925 Donald Ross course in the grounds of the hotel in Coral Gables, and one of the few places in Florida where the golf and the architecture are equally the reason to come.
The canals threading the property were built to carry hotel guests by gondola, and they are still in play. The hotel tower, modelled on the Giralda in Seville, is visible from nearly every hole. Worth walking.
3. Trump National Doral
Four courses, and the Blue Monster is the best known course in Miami. Dick Wilson laid it out in the early 1960s and successive architects have kept it current, most recently Gil Hanse.
Red Tiger is the placement course with island greens at the 6th and 14th. Golden Palm is the most traditionally Floridian, and Silver Fox is the one that does not look like Florida at all.
4. Miami Beach Golf Club
Miami Beach opened in 1923 and was rebuilt from the ground up for a reported eleven million dollars, reopening in 2002 as an Arthur Hills course.
It sits on a strip between the Atlantic and Biscayne Bay, minutes from South Beach, grassed in paspalum tee to green. Public.
5. The old municipals
Normandy Shores has the most distinguished pedigree in Miami municipal golf: the original layout is William Flynn and Howard Toomey, the partnership behind Shinnecock Hills. Palmetto is a Dick Wilson course you can play for twenty-one dollars. Miami Springs has been open since 1929. Greynolds is a Mark Mahannah nine from 1964.
None of these are long. All of them are cheap, walkable and genuinely old, which in Florida counts for something.
After the round
Miami is the one Florida market where the evening is as planned as the golf. MyRSVP's Miami guide covers the dining and nightlife, and most of our Miami course pages carry a pairing.