Town Rankings / Florida
The Best Golf Courses in Fort Myers
Thomas Edison wintered in Fort Myers, Henry Ford bought the place next door, and in the winter season the two most famous industrialists in America played golf at the town's country club, a Donald Ross course the city opened in 1917 and still runs today. Let that settle. The most historically loaded course in Southwest Florida is a municipal track with resident rates, known locally, with total affection, as The Fort. Fort Myers golf starts there and nothing else in town is close.
The bench is three deep: the Ross muni, a second city course from the 1970s, and a community course that serves its own neighborhood. We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value, and Fort Myers is the rare town where the same course wins all three arguments at once. The ranking below the top spot is a fair fight for second. The top spot is not a fight at all.
1Fort Myers Country Club
Fort Myers Country Club is a Donald Ross design opened in 1917, municipal then and municipal now, which makes it one of the great bargains in American golf: a genuine Ross, from the heart of his career, that any resident can play for city prices. Steve Smyers led a major renovation in the 2010s that sharpened the course without sanding off its century old character, and the result is a muni with real architectural bones that modern players can actually read. Edison and Ford played winter golf in this town in that era, and the course they would have known is recognizably the course on the ground now.
The concessions are municipal realities: heavy play, conditioning that follows a city budget rather than a membership's demands, and a flat Florida canvas that Ross had to furnish almost entirely from his own imagination. None of it moves the ranking. A playable, renovated, reasonably priced Donald Ross is the answer to almost any question a town ranking can ask, and Fort Myers is lucky enough to have its name on one. No. 1 by the widest margin in this series of Florida lists.
2Eastwood Golf Course
Eastwood is Fort Myers's other city course, a Robert von Hagge and Bruce Devlin design from 1977, and it plays the role of second muni with more ambition than the role usually gets. Devlin and von Hagge built bold, water threaded Florida golf in that era, and Eastwood has more going on architecturally than most municipal second courses: bigger features, more forced carries, a layout that asks the better player actual questions. For the local who has played The Fort a hundred times, Eastwood is the change of pace across town.
It finishes second because across town is where the Ross lives, and no 1977 muni outranks a renovated 1917 Ross on architecture, history, or value. Eastwood's honest claim is depth: it makes Fort Myers a two course municipal town, which doubles the tee sheet for residents and gives the city a genuine rotation. That is worth more to Fort Myers golfers across a year than any single round at a resort course thirty miles away.
3Shell Point Golf Club
Shell Point is the third option, the course attached to its own community on the way toward the islands, serving the residents around it the way community golf is supposed to: close, convenient, and woven into daily life rather than set apart as an event. The golf is a clear step below the two city courses in design and ambition, and this ranking will not inflate it. What it offers is a round for its neighborhood without a drive across town, and in a spread out Florida city that convenience is a real service.
It closes the list because a ranking has to rank, and because the top of this particular list is so strong that third place here still comes with a genuine recommendation attached for the golfer staying nearby. Not every town's bronze medal can say that.
Winter evenings, the light goes long and flat over The Fort and the last foursomes walk a course that Edison's Fort Myers would still recognize, at prices Edison's factory workers could have paid. The rest of Florida charges admission to its history. Fort Myers lets you play through it.