# The Best Golf Courses in Miami Beach

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-miami-beach-fl/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Florida


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

Miami Beach was a sales pitch before it was a city. The golf came first, in a way: Bayshore Golf Course opened in the 1923 era to sell lots on a sandbar, giving prospective buyers a green view and a reason to believe. A century later the island still has exactly three courses worth ranking, and the odd thing is how completely they divide the island between them. A private club, and two municipals, all within a short drive of each other.

This is a small bench and we will treat it like one. No padding, no fourth name imported from the mainland to make the list look bigger. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and on an island where the private club was built for the winter colony and the munis were built for everyone since, the order says something true about Miami Beach itself. It also produces a useful argument. Two of the three trace to the same architects from the same two year window, which means the island lets a golfer compare what Flynn and Toomey did for members against what they did for the public, on the same sand, in the same wind. Few places in Florida offer a comparison that clean.

## 1La Gorce Country Club

La Gorce is the private island club across the causeway, a William Flynn and Howard Toomey design opened in 1927, and it is the best golf on Miami Beach. Flynn's name carries weight anywhere in American golf, the man behind some of the most argued over courses in the country, and La Gorce is his work in the subtropics, built for members who wintered here when Miami Beach was new money and new land at the same time.

Local history ties a young Jack Nicklaus, who played junior golf in Miami, to La Gorce, and that link fits the club's role: this was where serious golf on the island lived while the public game grew up around it. The concession is the fence. La Gorce is private, full stop, and a ranking that leads with a course most golfers cannot play owes them the admission up front. Estimates for clubs of this standing run high; the club publishes nothing, and neither will we beyond that. Score the golf first, though, and the island's No. 1 is the course behind the gate.

## 2Miami Beach Golf Club

The public headliner is Miami Beach Golf Club, the old Bayshore ground redesigned by the Robert von Hagge group in 2001 into a municipal course with water in play and skyline views. It is the lot selling course grown up, now the city sells the round itself, at premium Miami Beach municipal pricing that would make a mainland muni manager sit down.

Von Hagge's sculpted style suits the island. On flat, reclaimed land with no natural feature to work with, bold shaping is not vanity, it is the only way to make eighteen distinct holes. The concession is that the shaping can feel manufactured next to La Gorce's older, quieter ground, and the fee tests the meaning of the word municipal. Second on the island, and the round every visiting golfer here will actually play. Play it early, before the heat and the island traffic both peak.

## 3Normandy Shores Golf Club

Normandy Shores sits on Normandy Isle in the north of the city, a municipal course with Flynn and Toomey design lineage from 1928, renovated by Arthur Hills in the 2000s. Read that again. The island's third course, its quieter muni, traces to the same design partnership as its private No. 1. Miami Beach golfers arguing about value could start and end with that fact.

The golf is the neighborhood version of the game, locals and regulars, a course woven into an island residential district rather than staged for visitors. The concession is resources and renown: Hills' renovation kept it current, but Normandy Shores does not carry the polish of the club up the road or the skyline setting of its sister muni. Third of three, and the best value argument on the island for a golfer who would rather play twice than pose once. The causeway takes you home past all three, the private gate, the famous muni, and the neighborhood course still lit by the last groups coming in.

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