Town Rankings / California

The Best Golf Courses in Rancho Santa Fe

Before the clambake belonged to Pebble Beach, it belonged here. Bing Crosby's tournament started at Rancho Santa Fe in the 1930s, drawing Hollywood down to a eucalyptus shaded village in the hills above Del Mar, and when the event eventually moved north it took the fame with it. Rancho Santa Fe kept the quiet. That trade, fame for quiet, is the whole character of the place and of its golf.

This is a town of private clubs, full stop. There is no public tee time on this list, no resort door left open. The covenant, the original planned community at the town's heart, wraps around its golf course, and the newer clubs spread across the surrounding hills. A ranking here is a quality ranking only, and we will not pretend otherwise: access scores zero for everyone, so the golf itself decides.

1Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club

Max Behr designed the covenant's course in 1929, and it remains the centrepiece of the village in a way modern clubs, built as amenities, never quite manage. The course is the town green. It plays through mature eucalyptus and across gentle, rolling ground, a walking course from golf's California golden age, designed by one of the era's genuine thinkers about what a golf hole should ask.

Behr's work rewards the golfer who reads ground rather than yardage books, and the course's restraint is its distinction in a county full of manufactured drama. The concession: restraint can read as plainness to a golfer raised on signature holes, and the course will not win a beauty contest against its canyon cut neighbors below. It wins this list instead on design intelligence and on place. Crosby chose this ground to start his tournament nearly a century ago. The men who built American golf tourism looked at the options and picked this one. That judgment has aged well.

2The Bridges at Rancho Santa Fe

The Bridges is the modern answer to Behr: a club built for spectacle in the canyon country east of the village, named for the bridges its routing uses to cross the ravines that cut the property. The golf is dramatic in the literal sense, elevation and exposure everywhere, views that run for miles, and a clubhouse operation pitched at the very top of the San Diego market.

It takes second because drama and design intelligence are different virtues, and this list pays for the second one first. The Bridges gives you the bigger day, the grander room, the course your guests will photograph. Rancho Santa Fe Golf Club gives you the better argument about golf. Reasonable members have chosen the Bridges' life over the covenant's for thirty years and slept fine. Our ranking is about the courses, and on the courses, 1929 beats the canyon.

3Fairbanks Ranch Country Club

Fairbanks Ranch is the family club of the group, a large gated community built around its golf in the San Dieguito valley, with the equestrian world for a neighbor and a membership that uses the place hard, all week, all year. The golf is solid modern parkland in a pretty valley setting, more playable and less theatrical than the Bridges, less historic than the covenant course.

Third place is a ceiling set by comparison rather than a complaint about quality. Fairbanks Ranch does the all round country club job as well as any club in North County, and families who belong there tend to stay for decades, which is its own ranking. But a town list separates the memorable from the merely excellent, and in Rancho Santa Fe the memorable slots are taken by a golden age original and a canyon spectacle. Fairbanks is the club you join. The two above it are the courses you argue about.

4Del Mar Country Club

Del Mar Country Club sits in the hills with a famous name borrowed from the coast below it, a private club with a polished, resort inflected feel and golf that runs through canyon edges and view corridors. It is the newest money feel of the four, immaculate and hospitable, the kind of club that hosts a wonderful guest day.

It closes the list because polish is the most common currency in Southern California private golf, and this town's other three clubs each hold something scarcer: history, spectacle, or community depth. Fourth in Rancho Santa Fe still means a course most towns would crown. That is the summary of this place, really. The clambake left in the 1940s and the golf stayed this good anyway, behind gates, under the eucalyptus, unbothered.