Town Rankings / Florida

The Best Golf Courses in Naples

Naples has more golf holes per capita than almost anywhere in America, which sounds like chamber of commerce talk until you drive it. Community after community, gate after gate, another eighteen folded into the pines and the lakes, most of it private and most of it invisible from the road. The public golfer in Naples is a rich man in a poor man's town: surrounded by golf, able to book almost none of it.

So this ranking is really about the handful of courses in the Naples orbit that a visitor can actually reach, and the fight among them is real. A tournament resort with two Greg Norman courses, a Rees Jones resort round in the middle of town, and a Jack Nicklaus course out in Estero with no houses on it that locals will defend against all comers. We score the golf first, and the golf first argument produces a No. 1 the television cameras never visit.

1Old Corkscrew Golf Club

Old Corkscrew is the local's hard pick, and locals are right. It is a Jack Nicklaus Signature design opened in 2007, built inside an Audubon certified natural setting with no residential housing on the course, named for the Corkscrew Swamp country of Southwest Florida. No houses. Say it again, because in Naples that sentence is close to a miracle. The golf runs through preserve, water shaping most holes, and the round feels like an expedition out of the gated world rather than a lap inside it.

It is regularly ranked among the best public courses in Southwest Florida, and semi-private access with dynamic premium pricing means a determined visitor can get on, which cannot be said for the acres of private golf around it. The concession is geography and difficulty. The course sits in Estero, north of Naples proper, so the town's name on this list comes with an asterisk locals stopped caring about years ago. And Nicklaus in a preserve does not do gentle. Water and wetlands shape most holes, and a loose swing gets expensive in golf balls. Bring extras. The walk through that swamp country, with no rooftop in sight, is still the best golf day the Naples area sells to the public.

2Tiburon Golf Club Gold Course

The Gold Course at Tiburon is the famous one, a Greg Norman design opened in 1998 at the Ritz-Carlton, home to the PGA Tour's December team event through its QBE Shootout and Grant Thornton eras, and host to the LPGA's CME Group Tour Championship, the tour's season finale. Its signatures are manufactured but effective: stacked sod wall bunkers and coquina waste areas, Norman's Australian instincts translated into Florida limestone.

Tournament golf on your resort course cuts both ways, and that is the concession. The Gold is built and conditioned to look right on television in December, and it plays like a stage set as much as a place, broad and groomed and watchable. Plenty of golfers prefer it to Old Corkscrew for exactly those reasons, the conditioning, the hotel, the sense of occasion. We rank it second on the golf itself. A stage, however fine, loses to a swamp with teeth.

3Tiburon Golf Club Black Course

The Black Course, Norman's second design here, opened in 2001, plays through pine and cypress strands with tighter fairways and more tree cover than the Gold. While the Gold takes the tournament duty, the Black takes the members and resort guests, and a fair number of them quietly prefer it. Trees change Florida golf completely. The ball has to be shaped and placed rather than launched, and the shade alone is worth money in a Naples summer.

The concession is ceiling. The Black has no championship, no signature feature a stranger can name, and its charms are the quiet kind that grow over repeat rounds rather than detonating on a first visit. Third here, and the better Tiburon round for a golfer who plays every week instead of once a year.

4Naples Grande Golf Club

Naples Grande is a Rees Jones design opened in 2000, routed around lakes in central Naples, known for its par 3 holes over water, and reached through the Naples Grande Beach Resort. In a private heavy town it is a popular upscale resort option, flat coastal Florida ground with Jones bunkering, competently built and honestly priced against its market.

Fourth is not a dismissal. It is a measure of this particular bench. Naples Grande does not have the Gold's stage, the Black's trees, or Old Corkscrew's wilderness, and its holes blur together in the memory faster than the three above it. What it has is location and access, a real golf course in the middle of Naples that a visitor can book. In this town, that alone keeps a course busy all winter, the trolleys rolling out across the lakes while the private gates stay shut on both sides of the road.