Town Rankings / Florida
The Best Golf Courses in Jupiter
Half the PGA Tour lives within five miles of Jupiter, or so it feels on any winter morning when the practice ranges fill with players whose names you know from Sunday leaderboards. They did not move here for the weather alone. They moved here because the golf density in this one small town is absurd, private clubs stacked on top of each other, and because a young pro can find a game any day of the year.
That makes Jupiter a strange ranking. The best courses are the ones most readers will never play, and the course most Jupiter golfers actually grew up on sits third on this list. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and we will not pretend the access column does not hurt. It does. It just does not hurt enough to move the top spot.
1The Bear's Club
The Bear's Club is Jack Nicklaus' own club, a Nicklaus design opened in 1999 on former scrub and citrus land close to his home in North Palm Beach, converted into sandy, natural golf that looks like the land was always waiting to be a course. Nicklaus has designed hundreds of courses for other people. This is the one he built for himself and his neighbors, and golfers who have seen both his resort work and this tend to use a different tone for this one.
It is the home club for many PGA Tour players in the Jupiter corridor, which is its own form of peer review. Tour players can join anywhere. They keep choosing the club where the membership is small, the privacy is strict, and nobody is selling anything. The concession writes itself: you will almost certainly never see it, and estimates put the cost of belonging in the highest tier in Florida. That is an estimate, as private clubs do not publish numbers. Score the golf first and The Bear's Club is Jupiter's No. 1, and the argument for anything else starts at second place.
2Jonathan's Landing Golf Club
Jonathan's Landing is the depth pick, a private club with 54 holes in Jupiter, with design work by Tom Fazio and Arthur Hills across the property dating to 1978. The Old Trail course plays through preserve land, which gives it the most natural setting of the club's courses and the strongest claim to second place here.
Fifty four holes changes what a club is. Members are not playing the same eighteen on a loop for thirty years, and a visiting golfer who gets one invitation may still only see a third of the place. The concession is focus. Nothing at Jonathan's Landing carries the single clear identity of The Bear's Club, no founder's name on the gate, no tour colony in the locker room. It is a very good, very large private club in a town where the bar for interesting is set unfairly high. Second in Jupiter would be first in most Florida towns.
3Abacoa Golf Club
Abacoa is the public course Jupiter's tour players actually grew up playing, and that line from local golf carries more weight than a design pedigree. It is a Joe Lee design opened in 1999, his last course, set in the Abacoa community with the spring training ballpark at Roger Dean Stadium as a neighbor. Public access, in Jupiter, at a course with a real architect and a real local following.
Lee's work is the gentler, playable school of Florida design, and Abacoa asks for placement and patience rather than power. The concession is that nothing here tests a strong player the way the private clubs do, and on a pure golf basis it gives ground to both courses above it. But this is the Jupiter round a reader can book this week, and the fact that the town's famous residents learned the game on it tells you the golf is honest. Third, and the first name to give anyone actually planning a trip.
4Jupiter Dunes Golf Course
Jupiter Dunes is a par 3 course near the inlet, 18 holes all of them par 3s, a Tom Fazio design from 1973, popular with beginners and juniors at low public rates. Ranking a par 3 course fourth on a list with The Bear's Club is not an insult. It is a category statement. There are no par 4s to argue about, no test to compare.
What Jupiter Dunes does, it does for the whole town. It is where kids start, where a good player sharpens a wedge game in an hour, where golf stays cheap and quick in a zip code that is neither. Every serious golf town needs a door into the game. Jupiter's happens to sit near the inlet, with the ocean air on it, and it has been opening that door since 1973. The tour players five miles away all started somewhere like this. That is the thought to keep as the range lights come on across town and another winter morning of very serious practice gets underway.