# The Best Golf Courses in Las Vegas Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-las-vegas-nv/ [The Course Rankings](/) Town Rankings / Nevada A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Las Vegas builds golf the way it builds everything: by moving an unreasonable amount of earth and money to a place where nature filed an objection, then charging admission. Trees where no trees grow. Rivers in the desert. The miracle is not that Vegas golf is artificial. The miracle is how much of it is genuinely good once you accept artifice as the local architecture. Six courses make this list, including one, Cascata, that sits in Boulder City and gets ranked in full there; it appears here because no honest account of golf a Strip visitor can play omits it, and because Vegas treats city limits as a suggestion. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it costs you. The top of the list is the most famous manufactured course on earth. The argument is whether anything manufactured can deserve that spot. We say this one does. ## 1Shadow Creek Golf Course Shadow Creek is Tom Fazio's desert mirage, built for Steve Wynn as a $500k a member private club, a number from the course's early mythology that tells you its founding purpose: not a golf course with a price, but a price with a golf course attached. Streams, waterfalls, a forest of transplanted pines north of the Strip, and for years almost nobody allowed in to see any of it. Then it opened to the public, sort of, at a green fee that functions as a velvet rope with a cash register, and the golf turned out to be the real thing. Fazio built a complete course inside the illusion: holes with shape and strategy, conditioning other expensive courses chase, total removal from the city twenty minutes away. The concession is that nothing here is natural, and golfers who believe great courses must be found rather than built will never forgive it. Fair. But ranking the golf that exists, Shadow Creek is the most accomplished course in Las Vegas. ## 2Cascata Golf Club Cascata, out in Boulder City, was Caesars' answer to Shadow Creek. Where Shadow Creek hides in its forest, Cascata performs in the open foothills, a river running through ground that never had one. It ranks second here and first in its own town's list: Boulder City owns it, Las Vegas claims it, and visitors experience it as a Vegas round with a limo ride attached. As pure golf it is closer to Shadow Creek than the gap in fame suggests, and the drama is architectural as well as decorative. The concession is that the artifice shows more here: you can see the machinery of the illusion in a way Shadow Creek's forest conceals. A half step behind, then, while conceding its fans have a real case. ## 3The Wynn Golf Club The Wynn Golf Club sits behind the Strip's towers, on the most valuable ground any golf course occupies in America, an argument about land economics the course keeps winning by simply being there. Also a Fazio production, it gives a Strip guest a quality round without a limo, a drive, or a plan: walk out of the hotel, play golf, walk back. The golf is a notch below the top two in ambition, a resort course in the best sense, polished, playable, photogenic against the towers, designed to send hotel guests back to the casino happy rather than humbled. The concession is the fee, and the feeling, hard to shake on a few holes, that you are playing in a very beautiful courtyard. Third here is no insult. For the visitor with one free morning and no car, it might be first. ## 4TPC Las Vegas TPC Las Vegas is the valley's tournament infrastructure, a tour affiliated course in Summerlin built to professional standards and open to anyone with the fee. It lacks the mythology of the top three and replaces it with credibility: desert canyon golf, playable by the public every week. The canyon holes give it character, and the test is the most honest one on this list: no illusion, no forest, just desert golf at a high standard. The concession is a corporate sameness in places, the TPC template showing through. For a strong player choosing one public round on golf alone, dollar for dollar, TPC Las Vegas has the best argument in the city. ## 5Las Vegas Country Club Las Vegas Country Club is the old Vegas course, a private club just off the Strip whose membership history runs through the city's Rat Pack decades, parkland golf in the desert city, green and shaded in a way the manufactured courses had to buy and this one simply grew into. Age is its distinction. The trees are real, grown rather than transplanted, and a round here connects a golfer to the city as it actually lived, not as it performs itself. As architecture it is a tier below the leaders, pleasant and traditional rather than significant, and access is members and guests. Fifth, as a nod to continuity. ## 6Bali Hai Golf Club Bali Hai closes the list, a tropical themed course at the south end of the Strip, close enough to the airport and the Welcome sign that convenience is its identity. Palms, lagoons, white sand, a theme executed with total commitment. The golf is resort golf without pretense of more, enjoyable, forgettable in places, priced for location rather than architecture, which everyone involved understands. Its concession is the theme itself: golfers who dislike themed golf will dislike Bali Hai in proportion to how well it does its job. But most Vegas rounds are not Shadow Creek. They are a morning stolen from a conference, on the course closest to the hotel, with the towers in view. Bali Hai serves that morning better than almost anyone, and as the Strip lights come on, the city makes its closing argument: in Las Vegas, convenience is a kind of architecture too. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.