Town Rankings / California
The Best Golf Courses in Los Angeles
Los Angeles has two golfs. One is played behind gates in the hills, at clubs so private that their membership lists read like studio credits, on Golden Age courses that rank with the best in America. The other is played at dawn by everyone else, at municipal courses where the tee sheet fills in minutes and the golf has been democratic since before the freeways. Both golfs are real. A Los Angeles ranking that ignores either one is lying.
We score the golf first, then the day, then access. That means the private masterpieces top this list on merit, and it means the public courses get judged as golf, not as charity cases. Rancho Park hosted 18 LA Opens, by the way. The public game here has its own history and it is not small.
1Los Angeles Country Club North Course
The North Course at Los Angeles Country Club is the finest course in the city and the gap is not worth arguing about. Set on prime ground in the middle of the west side, it plays through barrancas and across rolling terrain that feels imported from a better golfing continent, and its restoration to classic form has put it back in the conversation for the top handful of courses in the country. Its U.S. Open in 2023 merely confirmed what members of the architecture cult had said for years.
The concession is access, total and unapologetic. This club does not court the public, never has, and a tee time here is among the hardest gets in American golf. Estimates of what membership costs belong in the category of polite fiction. None of it is the ranking's problem. The golf is the golf, and in Los Angeles nothing else is close.
2Riviera Country Club (Pacific Palisades)
Riviera sits in a eucalyptus canyon in Pacific Palisades and has hosted major championships and an annual tour stop that players genuinely love, which is a combination almost no other course on earth manages. The short par 4 10th is the most debated hole in tour golf, a driveable temptation that ruins one contender a year. The bunker in the middle of the 6th green annoys people who have not thought about it enough.
Second to LACC, and Riviera partisans will call that recent bias, the product of one U.S. Open against Riviera's century of tournament weeks. Their case is respectable. Ours is that the North Course's land and variety edge Riviera's admittedly superb consistency. Either way, Los Angeles holds two of America's twenty best courses, and almost nobody who lives there can play them. That tension is the city's golf in one sentence.
3Bel-Air Country Club
Bel-Air is the most theatrical piece of ground on this list, a course threaded through canyons and across ravines in the hills above the city, with a swinging bridge and tunnels and views that belong in establishing shots. The golf underneath the theater is genuinely good, a Golden Age layout that uses its wild terrain instead of apologizing for it.
Third, behind two courses that outgun it on shot values, and ahead of everything public on the strength of holes that could exist nowhere else. The knock is that spectacle occasionally does the work strategy should. In Bel-Air, of all places, that criticism feels almost unfair. The spectacle is the point, and the golf survives it.
4Rancho Park Golf Course
Rancho Park is the busiest public answer in Los Angeles and one of the great municipal stories in American golf: 18 LA Opens were played here when the tour still went where the people were. It remains a real course, long and honest, on the west side, played by everybody from beginners to low handicaps who cannot get a weekend tee time anywhere prettier.
Fourth in this city is a high finish, and Rancho earns it on history and bones. The concession is the modern muni reality: slow rounds, worn spots, a facility run at full capacity forever. Play it early, walk it, and remember that Arnold Palmer played tournament golf on this ground. Los Angeles keeps that receipt in a public drawer.
5Griffith Park Wilson Golf Course
The Wilson Course in Griffith Park is the city's other public institution, longer and hillier than its sister course at the same complex, playing through the park's oak and canyon country with downtown visible from the high holes. It is a genuine test at a municipal price, which in Los Angeles is a combination worth protecting.
Fifth, because Rancho's history and location outrank it, but fifth with an argument attached: for the everyday golfer, Wilson may deliver more golf per dollar than anything on this page, private clubs emphatically included. The private trio above it win on architecture. Wilson wins Tuesday.
Three gates and two tee sheets. Los Angeles golf is a city divided cleanly in half, and the strange thing is how good both halves are.