# The Best Golf Courses in Palm Beach County, Florida Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-palm-beach-county-fl/ [The Course Rankings](/) County Rankings / Florida A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons Palm Beach County has 61 golf courses in our dataset, and the honest way to describe the top of this list is that it behaves like a national ranking that happens to share a county line. Seminole, the Bear's Club, PGA National, BallenIsles: within one county you can assemble a week of golf that most states cannot match with their whole map. The depth has a cost. Nearly all of the best of it is private, much of it fiercely so, and the county's public golfers play a different list than the one below. We rank the golf first, as we do in [the 5 best golf courses in Florida](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-florida/), and then tell you plainly where the public game actually lives. ## 1Seminole Golf Club Seminole stands apart, in this county and in most conversations about American golf. A Donald Ross design in Juno Beach, private to a degree that makes other private clubs look welcoming, and revered by touring professionals who play its pro member event and then talk about it all year. We give it no invented specifics because it needs none. Seminole is No. 1 here by acclamation, and any Palm Beach County list that started elsewhere would not be worth reading past its first heading. ## 2Bear's Club Jack Nicklaus founded the Bear's Club in Jupiter in 1999, near his North Palm Beach home, converting former scrub and citrus land into sandy, natural golf. It is the home club for many PGA Tour players in the Jupiter corridor, keeps a small membership, and guards its privacy strictly. Of the designed for himself Nicklaus courses, this is the one where the architect was also the founder, the neighbor, and the audience. Access costs belong only in the highest estimate tier, stated as an estimate. The golf, by every account that reaches us, justifies the club's place a half step behind Seminole. ## 3PGA National Champion Course The Champion Course is the county's public facing championship test, the Jack Nicklaus course at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, known everywhere for the Bear Trap, its three hole closing stretch over water, and for the Tour golf played over it each year. It is the rare course on this list a visitor can actually book, and it asks a visitor's game the same questions it asks professionals. Conditioning and difficulty both run hot. For a traveling golfer, this is the Palm Beach County round that requires no one's permission. ## 4BallenIsles Country Club East Course The East Course at BallenIsles carries the county's deepest tournament roots. Built in 1964, in the era when this site was the original PGA National, it hosted the PGA Championship in 1971, plus World Cup and PGA seniors history through the 1960s and 1970s. Dick Wilson and Joe Lee are the design names on its lineage, and Keith Foster led a major renovation in 2020. Private, with three courses in Palm Beach Gardens, and historically the equal of anything in the county on a given Sunday in 1971. ## 5Old Marsh Golf Club Old Marsh is the connoisseur's pick in Palm Beach Gardens, a Pete Dye design routed through marshland, private and low profile in a county that does not specialize in low profile. We rank it on reputation in broad strokes, and the reputation is consistent: Dye's hazards and angles on flat Florida ground, a members' course that serious golfers name before flashier neighbors. In a county of Nicklaus and heritage, Old Marsh is the entry for golfers who like their Florida golf with an edge on it. ## 6Boca Rio Golf Club Robert von Hagge designed Boca Rio in 1967, in Boca Raton, with no homes on the course, a purity of purpose that modern development golf almost never allows. It hosted the LPGA Gainbridge event in the 2020s, is known for pure golf focus and strong conditioning, and carries von Hagge's bold mounding and water use throughout. Private, with costs in the high estimate tier. Members talk about Boca Rio the way golfers talk about courses with nothing to sell them. That is a compliment with weight in Boca Raton. ## 7Breakers Ocean Course Golf at The Breakers dates to 1897, and the Ocean Course on Palm Beach island is Florida's oldest 18 hole golf course, first designed by Alexander H. Findlay in 1896. It plays par 70 at just 6,167 yards, resort guest access at luxury pricing, on ground beside the historic hotel where Florida resort golf effectively began. Short, old, and set where it is set, it outranks longer and harder courses below it because setting and lineage are part of the test here, and no other course in the county can offer a round that starts in 1897. ## 8Banyan Cay Resort & Golf Jack Nicklaus rebuilt the old President Country Club course in West Palm Beach, and the result opened in 2017 as Banyan Cay. It was the 300th course worldwide to feature Nicklaus's design work, a number that says something about both the man and the market. Resort and private hybrid access makes it one of the more reachable names on this list, and the Nicklaus rebuild gives it a modern strategic spine that several older neighbors lack. ## 9Bear Lakes Country Club Bear Lakes holds two Jack Nicklaus courses in West Palm Beach, the Lakes and the Links, and hosted the PGA Tour Qualifying Tournament in 2009, having hosted it twice before. Q School is the cruelest examination in golf, and a club asked to hold it three times has championship bones. Private. Past these nine, the list runs long and mostly ordinary, as any 61 course county's list must. The public golfer's county is real, though: Abacoa in Jupiter, Joe Lee's last design, par 72 at 7,200 yards with water on 14 holes, Atlantis with its roughly 100 bunkers, and the municipal Boca Raton Golf and Racquet Club all offer honest golf without a sponsor. But the summit of this county is private, sandy, and guarded, and it ends as it began, with a Ross course by the ocean. **Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.