# The Best Golf Courses in Lihue

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-lihue-hi/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Hawaii


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Lihue is Kauai's working town, the airport, the county seat, the harbor, and its golf makes a claim no other town on this site can match: the best course here might be the municipal one. Three courses make the list, a resort layout in town, a Nicklaus course at a resort development, and a county course up the coast in Wailua that Kauai golfers include in the conversation without blinking. Locals ranking a muni with the resort courses sounds like hometown loyalty. In this case it is a defensible position, and this list takes it.

We score the golf first, then the day, then what access costs. Apply that in Lihue and the county course wins on the golf outright in the eyes of a lot of people who play all three, then wins the day and the price going away.

## 1Wailua Municipal Golf Course

Wailua is a county course set right on the ocean, and it is not a token municipal entry. It hosted USGA public links championships, which means the national governing body walked this muni, measured it, and put its public links title on the line here. That pedigree shows in the bones of the place: a real layout on real oceanfront land, the kind of site a resort developer would kill for, held by the county for the people of Kauai.

The golf is honest in the way good munis are. Trade winds off the water, greens that reward the player who understands them, no resort varnish between you and the test. The concession is conditioning, because it is always the concession at a busy county course: tee sheets are crowded, surfaces take traffic, and the polish will not match the resort down the road on a given Tuesday. Kauai golfers accept the trade without hesitation, because what you get for it is a championship tested ocean course at a county price. That is the best deal in this ranking and the best course in Lihue, and we are aware those are two different claims. Here, unusually, both hold.

## 2Puakea Golf Course

Puakea is Lihue's own course, the one in town, playing in the shadow of the Haupu mountain range with green, inland Kauai all around it. Where Wailua is ocean golf, Puakea is valley golf: lush, framed by ridgelines, protected a little more from the trades, and kept to a standard that makes it the easiest recommendation for a visitor based in Lihue who wants a polished round without a drive.

It ranks second for one reason: the ceiling. Puakea does everything well and nothing at the level that makes a course a destination. There is no championship record here and no signature stretch people describe years later. That is a smaller sin than it sounds. A town's second course that is this good, this pretty, and this convenient is a luxury most towns on this site would take instantly. It loses only to a muni with a USGA pedigree and an ocean. Most courses would.

## 3Ocean Course at Hokuala

The Ocean Course at Hokuala is the resort entry, a Jack Nicklaus design attached to the development on Nawiliwili Bay, and on pedigree alone it expects to win this list. Nicklaus courses carry a known test: demanding, sculpted, built to a resort standard of conditioning that the county course cannot match. The ocean frontage on the closing stretch gives it the postcard holes of the three.

So why third? Two reasons. Pedigree is not performance, and the Hokuala experience has always been a little more about the development around the golf than the golf itself, real estate logic wearing a Nicklaus signature. And access at resort prices has to beat a USGA tested muni on the ocean and a beloved town course to justify itself. It does not, not here. Book it for the conditioning and the finishing holes. Understand that Lihue's golfers, given the choice, mostly drive to Wailua.

In the late afternoon the trades come straight off the water at Wailua and the late groups lean into it on the ocean holes, county golfers playing championship ground for county money. Every town in America says its muni is special. Kauai can prove it.

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