# The Best Golf Courses in Hot Springs Village

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hot-springs-village-ar/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Arkansas


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Nine golf courses for about 15,000 residents. Run that ratio past any other town in America and watch it lose. Hot Springs Village is the country's largest gated community, and golf is not an amenity here, it is the organizing principle: the roads, the neighborhoods, and a good share of the residents' calendars all bend around tee sheets. People do not move to the Village and take up golf. They move to the Village because of golf, and the depth of the bench, nine courses deep, is the whole point.

A ranking inside a system like this works differently. Eight of the nine are community courses run for the property owners, priced and paced for people who play three or four times a week, and one, Diamante, is a fully private club sitting on top of the pyramid. We rank the golf first, then the day, then access, and we are candid about the limit of the exercise: separating the middle Village courses is a finer call than the public record fully supports, so the middle of this list is an argument, not a measurement.

## 1Diamante Country Club

Diamante is the headliner and the clear No. 1. It is the Village's private club, the course that gets mentioned outside Arkansas, and the one round in the community that operates on national rather than neighborhood standards. In a place saturated with golf, Diamante is the course residents point to when an outsider asks what the Village is capable of at its best.

The concession is written into its model. Diamante is private inside a community that is already gated, a door behind a door, and the typical Village golfer plays it rarely or never. Ranking it first is a verdict on the golf, not on its importance to daily life here, where it may rank fifth. Both things are true, and the first one wins a best-courses list.

## 2Isabella Golf Club

Isabella leads our ranking of the community courses. Among the Village's owner-run layouts it has the strongest reputation as a test, the course the better players in the community tend to name first when the Diamante conversation ends. In a system built for volume, Isabella is where the competitive game concentrates.

It concedes the obvious: it is a community course, maintained and priced for resident play, and it does not pretend to Diamante's polish. Second in the Village still means something here, because the Village's second tier would be the entire golf scene in most towns its size.

## 3Balboa Golf Club

Balboa sits third, a well-regarded community course that also does duty representing the Village in Hot Springs conversations, since it is one of the names visitors encounter most. Its case is consistency: a solid round in the Ouachita woods, in a community where solid rounds are the baseline rather than the achievement.

The honest knock on Balboa, and on this whole middle group, is separation. Swap Balboa and Granada below and few Village residents would riot. We place it third on reputation among the regulars, and we flag the margin as thin because it is.

## 4Granada Golf Club

Granada is fourth, another community layout in the deep middle of the Village system, and the description that fits is the one that fits the Village itself: pleasant, wooded, busy with people who chose to live exactly this life. Granada's golfers are loyal, which in a nine-course community is real information. Nobody has to play any single course here.

It ranks below Balboa on the same thin evidence, the pecking order as locals describe it, and above Cortez on the strength of that local regard. If that sounds like ranking by clubhouse consensus, it is, and clubhouse consensus in a town of 15,000 golfers is data of a kind.

## 5Cortez Golf Club

Cortez closes the list as the fifth of the Village courses we rank, which still leaves four more unranked inside the gates, a fact that tells the Hot Springs Village story better than any single course description. Cortez is everyday community golf, the home course for its neighborhood, and its residents would not trade their routine for a ranking.

Fifth here is not an insult; it is a rounding error in a community with absurd depth. The Village does not have a best-course problem. It has a calendar problem, nine courses and only seven days, and Cortez fills its share of those days for the people who live on it.

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