# The Best Golf Courses in Charlevoix

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-charlevoix-mi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Michigan


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Charlevoix does summer the way Michigan towns have done it for a hundred years: boats in the channel, a drawbridge that stops traffic and starts arguments, and cottages full of families who have been coming since before the roads were paved. Its golf has the same split personality. On one side of town sits a Golden Age course the purists will cross the state for. On the other, a nine hole municipal that costs about what lunch costs. Both are exactly what they claim to be, and this ranking respects both for it, in that order.

## 1Belvedere Golf Club

Belvedere is a William Watson design from 1923, restored in recent years back toward what Watson drew, and it hosted the Michigan Amateur 40 times. Sit with that number. A state amateur does not keep returning to a course for four decades out of habit. It returns because the course asks complete questions at a modest scale, because the greens have enough tilt and contour to embarrass good putters, and because match play on a classic course with real angles never goes stale.

The restoration is the story inside the story. A restored Watson is a course given back its original intentions: its width, its angles, its greens as he drew them, after decades in which classic courses slowly became corridor tests. However you get on at Belvedere, walk it. This is golf from the era when courses were built for walking and for the wind off Lake Michigan, which finds the property often enough to matter.

The concession is conditioning expectations. Golfers raised on wall to wall irrigation and tour level fringe will find Belvedere firm, brown at the edges in a dry August, and unbothered by it. That is not neglect. That is the point. Purists rank it with the best in Michigan, and after the restoration the purists are right.

## 2Antrim Dells Golf Club

Antrim Dells, south near Ellsworth, is the working round of the Charlevoix area: eighteen holes through rolling farmland and woods, priced for people who live here, busy all summer with leagues and family groups. It does not pretend to be Belvedere and never embarrasses itself by trying. The land moves more than you expect, a few holes climb and fall properly, and a full afternoon here costs what nine holes cost in a resort town an hour south.

Its limits are the limits of its class. The architecture is straightforward, the greens mostly ask you to hold them rather than solve them, and a good player will feel in control by the fourth hole. But rankings need a value anchor, and in Charlevoix the honest second spot belongs to the course that keeps local golf local. Antrim Dells does that job every day of the season.

## 3Charlevoix Municipal Golf Course

Nine holes, city run, inside the town itself. The Charlevoix Municipal is the kind of course rankings usually skip, which is a mistake, because it explains the town. This is where kids learn the game, where cottage owners sneak out at dawn before the boats, and where a visitor with two hours and borrowed clubs can still get a real walk in real golf country.

As golf it is modest and it finishes third because it should. The holes are short, the test is gentle, and nobody's bucket list has it in ink. But a town ranking that only counts the gated and the famous misses how a place actually plays the game. Charlevoix plays it here, cheaply and often, a few blocks from the water.

The purists will drive to Belvedere, play it twice, and argue about Watson all the way home over the drawbridge. They are right to. The rest of Charlevoix will be on the muni at dawn, also right, just quieter about it.

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