Town Rankings / Florida
The Best Golf Courses in Miami
For five decades, the road to a spring PGA Tour title ran through a fountain in Doral. The Blue Monster's 18th, water down the left, hotel towers behind the green, decided tournaments on television while the rest of Miami golf happened in its shadow. A city ranking here starts with that shadow whether we like it or not.
Miami's bench is really two stories. One is Doral, a resort with multiple courses and a tournament name that still outweighs everything else in the market. The other is older and more interesting: a 1925 Donald Ross in Coral Gables with a great hotel attached, and a municipal course on Miami Beach that charges like it knows its address. We score the golf first, the day second, and access third, and the top of the list earns its place on a finishing hole.
1Trump National Doral Blue Monster
The Blue Monster was designed by Dick Wilson and opened in 1962, then given a major redesign by Gil Hanse completed in 2014. It hosted the tour for decades, the Doral Open and then the WGC events, and it earned its nickname honestly: length and water, hole after hole, in the South Florida wind. Hanse's work sharpened the strategy without softening the menace, which is the correct brief for a course whose entire identity is menace.
The signature is the 18th, a long par 4 with water down the left and the fountain as backdrop. Every golfer who watched golf on television in the eighties or nineties can picture a leader standing on that tee with a one shot lead and nowhere safe to bail out. Courses are ranked on the golf they ask for, and few resort courses in America ask for a shot that specific under that much pressure.
The concession is price and temperature, in both senses. Resort access at premium South Florida pricing, on a course that beats up mid handicappers for four hours, is not a relaxing vacation round. Play it for the examination and the history. If you want a pleasant afternoon, this list has other ideas, and the Monster's feelings will not be hurt.
2Biltmore Golf Course Coral Gables
The Biltmore is the connoisseur's Miami round: a Donald Ross design opened in 1925 alongside the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, restored by Brian Silva in 2007 back toward Ross character. The hotel tower is the backdrop every golfer photographs, but the golf underneath it is the real article, routed through canals and mature banyan and oak corridors that shape shots the way Ross intended, by asking for position rather than power.
It carries University of Miami golf history, and Coral Gables gives it something Doral cannot manufacture: a real neighborhood, a real street grid, a course that belongs to a place. The concession is scale. Next to the Blue Monster, the Biltmore is the shorter, quieter test, and a bomber will feel underused. Second place, and the round we would send a golf architect to first.
3Trump National Doral Red Tiger
The Red Tiger is Gil Hanse's redesign of Doral's former Red Course, reopened under its new name in 2014, and its whole argument is contrast. Shorter and more strategic than the Blue Monster, it asks for thinking where the Monster asks for survival. On a two round Doral stay, the Red Tiger is the round players talk about with more affection, because it lets them play golf instead of enduring it.
Affection is not the same as rank. The concession is that the Red Tiger lives in its sibling's shadow by design, the alternative course at a resort whose name was made by the other one, and nothing about its test matches the 18th next door with a tournament on the line. Third in Miami, first in the category of second rounds that rescue a trip.
4Miami Beach Golf Club
Miami Beach Golf Club is a municipal course, which in most cities means a discount and an apology. Here it means municipal access at premium Miami Beach pricing, and the market pays it, because the course sits on Miami Beach itself with water in play and the skyline as a view. The current course is a Robert von Hagge redesign from 2001, on ground that began as the Bayshore Golf Course in the 1923 era, built in the land boom that invented Miami Beach.
Von Hagge's group builds bold, sculpted golf, and a muni with that much shaping and that much water is a strange and enjoyable hybrid. The concession is the rate card. A municipal golfer from anywhere else in America will read the fee and assume a misprint, and the value argument only works if you accept that land on Miami Beach reprices everything it touches. Fourth here, on golf. On the list of munis you can brag about playing, it sits near the top of the national pile, with the Atlantic a short walk from the last green.