Town Rankings / Florida
The Best Golf Courses in Orlando
In March, Orlando golf narrows to one zip code and one name. Bay Hill, Arnold Palmer's tournament, the umbrella on every tee marker, and a finishing stretch the tour has been failing on television for over forty years. The rest of the year the city goes back to being what it really is: the deepest resort golf market in America, with a private club full of tour players hiding in the southeast suburbs.
The lazy version of this ranking is Bay Hill and then a shrug. The real version has a fight underneath it. A Fazio private club, a Nicklaus homage to St Andrews in the middle of Florida, and a big hotel resort course all have claims. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. The headliner still wins. The middle is stronger than the headliner's shadow suggests.
1Bay Hill Club & Lodge
Bay Hill was designed by Dick Wilson and opened in 1961, then reworked under Arnold Palmer, who bought the club in 1975 and made it his winter home. It has hosted the PGA Tour's Arnold Palmer Invitational since 1979. That sentence contains the whole argument: a course good enough that the King chose to live on it, test himself against it, and attach his name to the tournament played over it.
The golf is Wilson's bones with Palmer's muscle, and the finish is the examination. The 18th plays over water to a green guarded by rocks, a second shot that has ended winning chances on live television for decades, and the par 3 17th over water is the Sunday test before it. Palmer's statue and umbrella are the branding. The closing holes are the substance.
The concession is the gate and the grind. Play requires staying at the lodge or a member's access, at a premium resort posture, and the course in tournament shape is a long, hard walk for a vacation golfer. None of that moves it. First in Orlando, by acclamation, the way Palmer would have insisted it be settled: on the course, in March, over water at the last.
2Lake Nona Golf & Country Club
Lake Nona is Tom Fazio's work, opened in 1986, a private club that became the home address of a remarkable share of the PGA and LPGA tours. When that many elite players can live anywhere and choose one club's fairways to walk their dogs past, the course underneath the real estate deserves a hard look. The closing holes play along Buck Lake, and the club hosted the 1993 World Cup of Golf, along with the Tavistock Cup team events of the 2000s that existed mainly because so many tour players lived on both sides of that particular rivalry.
The concession is the mirror image of Bay Hill's. Lake Nona's golf is excellent and its setting is serene, but it has never had to prove itself in public, week after week, with the world watching a one shot lead come down the last. It is a members' course of the highest order rather than an examination paper. Estimates put belonging in a high tier, unpublished as always. Second in Orlando, and the invitation most local golfers would take first if both envelopes arrived the same morning.
3Grand Cypress Golf Club
The New Course at Grand Cypress is Jack Nicklaus' St Andrews tribute, opened in 1988 inside the resort's 45 hole complex, and it remains one of the most distinctive concept courses in Orlando. Double greens. Deep bunkers. A Road Hole concept, Swilcan Bridge style touches, links furniture transplanted into Central Florida humidity. The whole thing should not work, and mostly it does, because the features are functional rather than decorative. A double green changes how you play a hole wherever it sits.
The concession is the concept itself. A tribute course spends some of its identity honoring somewhere else, and purists will always rank an original above a quotation, however loving. Third here, with a warning attached: of the four courses on this list, this is the one a visiting golfer remembers hole by hole a year later. Memorability is a kind of evidence too.
4Ritz-Carlton Golf Club Orlando
The Ritz-Carlton's course is the big resort entry, the Grande Lakes round, and it does the job the Orlando market asks of it: a polished hotel golf day, conditioning and service at the level the name promises, a course a corporate group or a hotel guest can enjoy without a local guide or a member's signature. In a city built on visitors, that is a legitimate product, and it fills tee sheets for a reason.
It finishes fourth because this ranking scores the golf first, and the three courses above it each carry something this one does not: a tournament examination, a tour colony, a concept nobody else attempted. The concession runs in its favor on the day column. For a golfer in town for two nights who wants one easy, handsome round and a good lunch after, the Ritz-Carlton may be the correct booking even while it sits last here. Ranking and booking are different arts. Orlando, with Bay Hill's umbrella over all of it, keeps both trades busy all year.