# The Best Golf Courses in Bandon Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-bandon-or/ [The Course Rankings](/) Town Rankings / Oregon A leading golf course in Oregon. Photo: Visitor7, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons There is no town golf like this anywhere else in America, because there is no other place where five courses share one stretch of cliff, the carts are banned, the caddies wear white, and the wind off the Pacific gets a vote on every shot you hit. Bandon is not a town with a good resort attached. It is a remote fishing town on the southern Oregon coast that became, by the force of one property, the place American golfers measure every other trip against. Ranking its courses against each other is ranking siblings, and every order below will start an argument. Good. That is what the place is for. A note on method before the fighting starts: we score the golf first, then the day, then setting and access. All five are walking-only, all five are public in the sense that anyone can book and pay, and the differences are in design philosophy. Links purists, modernists, and romantics will each build a different list from the same five courses. This is ours. ## 1Bandon Dunes Golf Resort Pacific Dunes Course Pacific Dunes is Tom Doak working on ground that looks like it was waiting for him, dunes and cliff edge and gorse, routed so the ocean appears and disappears and then arrives all at once. It is the course at Bandon that golfers name when they are allowed only one, and the reason is the variety inside a single round: holes that hug the cliff, holes that turn inland into the dunes, greens that sit in bowls and on shelves, and wind that rearranges the whole examination between morning and afternoon. The concession is real. Pacific's back nine carries the postcard holes, and a critic can argue the course is two experiences stitched together, the inland stretch working harder for its drama. We have heard it. We have also watched golfers finish the cliff holes in a crosswind and say nothing for a full minute. No. 1, and the recency of everyone else's argument does not move it. ## 2Bandon Dunes Golf Resort Bandon Dunes Course The original. Bandon Dunes came first, along the same cliffs, and it is the course that proved an American developer could build walking-only links golf on a remote coast and golfers would come. Every course ranked below it, and arguably Pacific above it, exists because this one worked. As pure golf it remains a sweeping, playable test, more forgiving than Pacific, more conventional in its pleasures, and for many visitors still the most fun round on the property. Why second? Because Pacific asks more interesting questions hole by hole, and this ranking scores the golf first. Bandon Dunes' claim is historical and emotional, and it is a strong claim. It just loses to the better examination by a nose, the way the firstborn loses to the gifted younger sibling in every family story. ## 3Bandon Dunes Golf Resort Bandon Trails Course Trails is Coore and Crenshaw going inland, away from the cliffs into dunes, meadow, and forest, and it is the separatist candidate on property: the course the architecture obsessives rank first and the postcard hunters rank last. We split the difference at third. Trails contains some of the most thoughtful golf at Bandon, holes that reveal themselves slowly and greens with more internal movement than the ocean courses dare. A round here after two days of cliff golf feels like reading the second half of a book you thought you understood. The concession runs both ways. Trails gives up the ocean, and at Bandon the ocean is the whole premise of the trip. Golfers who fly across the country to stand on cliffs do not always want a masterclass in restraint among the trees. The golf says top two. The day, and the reason you came, say third. We score both, so third it is. ## 4Bandon Dunes Golf Resort Sheep Ranch Course Sheep Ranch has a mile of ocean frontage, which is not a statistic, it is a condition: for long stretches of the round there is nothing between you and Japan but water and wind. It is the most exposed course at Bandon, the one where weather stops being a factor and becomes the author. Golfers who caught it on a calm evening will tell you it is the finest walk on the property, and they may be right about their day. We rank it fourth because exposure is a setting argument before it is a golf argument, and the design underneath the scenery, while very good, does not separate from the pack the way Pacific's routing or Trails' greens do. On the wrong windy morning it can also become survival rather than examination. Fourth at Bandon is still better than first almost anywhere else on earth. ## 5Bandon Dunes Golf Resort Old Macdonald Course Old Macdonald is the tribute course, a love letter to the template holes of the old masters, big and wide and breezy, built for the ground game and for golfers who know why a punchbowl green is fun. Its scale is its charm: enormous greens, enormous fairways, a round that feels like it takes place in a larger country than the other four. Last here is the hardest placing on this list and we concede the counter-case happily: plenty of smart golfers rank Old Mac second, for its width, its templates, and its sheer playability in the wind. We put it fifth because homage, however brilliantly built, is still homage, and four original statements on the same property outscore the tribute. Bring the argument to the first tee. Everyone at Bandon does. Five courses, one cliff, no carts, and a ranking that will be relitigated in the lodge tonight by better golfers than us. That relitigation is not a flaw in the place. It is the place. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.