Town Rankings / Arkansas
The Best Golf Courses in Hot Springs, Arkansas
People were playing golf in Hot Springs while the bathhouses were still the main event. Hot Springs Country Club dates to 1898, which makes the golf here nearly as old as the resort trade itself, and the setting has not changed its essential character since: two courses in the Ouachita Mountains, in a town built on springs, steam, and the idea that a place can be good for you. Most American golf towns invented their history for a brochure. This one just kept the receipts.
The list below spans the old resort club, a second local option at Belvedere, and one course borrowed from Hot Springs Village up the road, because golfers staying in town play all of them. We rank the golf first, then the day, then access, and in Hot Springs the day counts for more than usual. A round here is part of a trip that includes Bathhouse Row and mountain air, and a ranking that ignored that would be scoring a different vacation than the one people take.
1Hot Springs Country Club Arlington Course
The Arlington is the lead course at Hot Springs Country Club and the top round in town. It carries the club's name, its history, and its best ground, the older of the two identities at a club that has been hosting resort golf since 1898. Courses that survive that long in one place accumulate something no new build can fake, which is a routing that generations of golfers have tested in every weather the Ouachitas produce.
The concession is that resort-club golf of this vintage rarely wins on pure architecture against modern design, and the Arlington does not ask to be judged that way. Its case is completeness: real golf, real age, the full resort day around it. In Hot Springs that is the top spot, and it has held it for over a century, which is its own kind of evidence.
2Hot Springs Country Club Park Course
The Park Course is the club's second 18 and the natural second round of a Hot Springs stay. Having two courses at one address since the early days of the resort era is the club's structural advantage: a visitor can build a whole weekend inside one gate, and the Park gives that weekend its change of pace.
It ranks second because it lives second, in bookings and in reputation, behind the Arlington. That is a softer criticism than it sounds. Most towns on this list would trade their No. 1 for Hot Springs' No. 2 and the 1898 clubhouse culture that comes with it.
3Hot Springs Village Balboa Golf Course
Balboa comes from Hot Springs Village, the big gated community outside town, and it represents the Village's golf inside this ranking: one of a deep bench of community courses, built for residents who play constantly and visitors who get access through the Village's system. As a round, it is the modern counterpoint to the country club pair, a community course in the Ouachita woods rather than a resort course by the bathhouses.
It places third here mostly on geography and identity. It is good Village golf, but it belongs to the Village's story first, and that story gets its own ranking elsewhere on this site. As a guest in the Hot Springs list, third is the honest slot.
4Belvedere Golf Club
Belvedere is the local's name on the list, the smaller club option for golfers who live in Hot Springs rather than visit it. Every resort town needs one: the place where the regular game happens while the visitors loop the famous club up the road.
The public record on Belvedere is thin, and we will not manufacture depth it may or may not have. Fourth place, plainly stated, for a course whose value is local and weekly rather than historic and touristed. Hot Springs ends, for a golfer, where it began: steam rising off the springs in the morning, tee times at a club older than the national park service's presence here, and mountains doing the framing for free.