# Belvedere Golf Resort and Spa: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/belvedere-golf-resort-and-spa-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / Arkansas


A golf ball beside the hole on a green. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

This profile comes with an ending most profiles do not have. The Belvedere course in Hot Springs closed in 2013. So what follows is partly a course profile and partly a record of what Arkansas golfers lost, because for a stretch of its life this was not a footnote course. In a 1994 Arkansas Business readers poll of the state's best 25 courses, Belvedere ranked as high as No. 6, and the poll said its holes 9 through 12 were perhaps the best four back to back holes in the state. That is a strong claim for a resort course in a spa town, and it deserves to be taken seriously rather than waved away as hometown voting.

The first nine holes were built in 1949, in the years when Hot Springs was still drawing visitors for the baths and the racing as much as for golf. The full course played 6,767 yards at par 72, with a rating of 72.9 and a slope of 132, on Bermuda fairways and bent grass greens. Those numbers describe a real test, not a pitch and putt attached to a hotel. A slope of 132 on Bermuda in Arkansas heat means the course asked questions in August that plenty of bigger name courses do not.

## The four holes people remembered

Rankings of dead courses live or die on specifics, and Belvedere has two worth keeping. The first is that run from 9 through 12, the stretch the 1994 poll singled out. Four consecutive holes rated the best sequence in a state is the kind of thing golfers argue about for years, and the fact that a readers poll landed there suggests it was not one great hole carrying three ordinary ones. It was a movement in the middle of the round where the course kept raising its hand.

The second is the signature hole, the par 3 17th at 187 yards. A long par 3 that late in a round is a designer's statement about nerve. At 187 yards you cannot bunt it. You have to hit a full shot, late in the day, with the round's outcome usually still unsettled. Courses remember their finishing tests, and Belvedere's members clearly remembered that one.

## What a closure actually means

The honest concession here is not about design weakness. It is that we cannot verify any of this with a tee time anymore. The course closed in 2013, per GolfPass, and Hot Springs golf moved on to other addresses. Resort golf is an economics business before it is an architecture business, and plenty of sound courses have closed for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of the 10th hole. Belvedere's poll history, top 15 finishes in Arkansas readers polls and that No. 6 peak, says the golf itself held up its end.

For the living version of this conversation, see [our Hot Springs town ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hot-springs-ar/) and [the Arkansas state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-arkansas/), where the courses still taking tee times carry the list.

A closed course with a remembered stretch of holes is a particular kind of loss. Nobody can settle the argument about 9 through 12 anymore by playing them. The record says they were the best four in a row in Arkansas. Belvedere gets the last word by default now, and on the evidence available, it earned the benefit of the doubt.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.