County Rankings / California
The Best Golf Courses in Riverside County, California
Fifty seven courses sit on Riverside County's list, and almost all of them are in one desert valley. The Coachella Valley did not just collect golf courses, it collected golf history: Ryder Cups, presidential foursomes, a women's major that ended with champions jumping into a pond. Ranking this county means ranking the desert's memory as much as its architecture. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it costs you to get on. Here is the top of a very long bench. The statewide context sits in the California ranking.
1Dinah Shore Tournament Course
Desmond Muirhead designed it, work beginning in 1968, and it opened in 1971 as the first course at Mission Hills in Rancho Mirage. From 1972 it was home of the Dinah Shore tournament, which became an LPGA major in 1983 and stayed through 2022 before moving to Texas. Champions traditionally leapt into Poppie's Pond beside the 18th green after winning. It plays par 72 at 7,250 yards, and for four decades it was the stage of the first major of the women's golf year. No course in this county carries a bigger competitive story, and the routing holds up under it.
2La Quinta Country Club
Lawrence Hughes designed it and his brother Frank built it. Members began play in November 1959 on 130 acres of sand and sagebrush with 28 charter members, and President Dwight Eisenhower formally dedicated it in October 1960, with Crosby, Hope, and Randolph Scott at the opening. It joined the Bob Hope Classic rotation in 1964 and marked 50 years in the PGA Tour event in the 2020s. The course plays just over 7,000 yards with narrow fairways and greens the pros call among the best on tour. Phil Mickelson calls it one of his favorite stops in the rotation. Private since its hotel days and member owned since 1977, it is the desert's purest members' championship course.
3Journey at Pechanga
The county's one entry that is not desert golf. Steve Forrest of Arthur Hills and Steve Forrest and Associates designed Journey at Pechanga in Temecula, opened August 2008 at the Pechanga Resort Casino. It plays par 72 at 7,219 yards across 300 acres at the base of Pu'eska Mountain, rising and falling some 300 feet. The 420 yard sixth drops so steeply that tee shots hang in the air eight to ten seconds. The par 3 17th, Island in the Sky, has its green perched at the end of a high desert ridge, and the 18th finishes on a Biarritz green. Every hole carries a Luiseno name, and the routing was kept clear of sacred tribal sites. Resort access, and the most dramatic land in the county.
4Andalusia Country Club
Rees Jones at Coral Mountain in La Quinta, his first original course in the Coachella Valley. Par 72, 7,521 yards, a 76.0 rating, among the longest tests in the desert. Nine lakes and three waterfalls cross the routing at the base of the Santa Rosa and Coral Mountains, and the club covers 525 acres. A planned second course was never built after the 2008 recession, which leaves Andalusia as a single, concentrated statement. Private, long, and unapologetic about it.
5Bermuda Dunes Country Club
Billy Bell Jr. built it in 1960 with 27 holes in three nines. It was one of the original four courses of the Palm Springs Golf Classic in 1960, hosted PGA Tour events from 1960 to 2018, and was the site of Arnold Palmer's last official regular PGA Tour victory. The pros historically feasted on its 122 slope, the gentlest test in the Classic rotation. That gentleness is the point of ranking it here: a tour venue across six decades that members can actually enjoy daily, set among the Santa Rosa, San Jacinto, and Shadow Mountain ranges.
6Eldorado Country Club
Built in 1957 in Indian Wells on a former fruit ranch by Johnny Dawson and Jimmy Hines, designed by Lawrence Hughes. The first tee shot was struck on November 22, 1957, and less than two years later Eldorado hosted the 1959 Ryder Cup. Multiple U.S. presidents have been honorary members. A Ryder Cup inside two years of opening is a launch no modern club can buy, and the course has carried that weight quietly ever since in Indian Wells, the county's most club dense town.
7Classic Club
Arnold Palmer designed it, opened 2005 in Palm Desert, built specifically to host the Bob Hope Classic, which it did from 2006 to 2008 before tour players' complaints about wind and difficulty ended the run. Par 72 at 7,322 yards, 30 acres of water, 14 bridges, more than 5,000 pine, pepper, and olive trees, and famously not a palm tree in sight. It is public and Troon operated, which makes it the highest ranked course in this county that anyone can simply book. Golfweek named it among the top five new public courses in America in 2006.
8Celebrity Course
Clive Clark's redesign of the old Ted Robinson West Course at Indian Wells Golf Resort opened in November 2006. Par 72, 7,050 yards, streams, split level lakes, waterfalls, and 97 bunkers. It hosted the LG Skins Game in 2007 and 2008. It is city owned, part of a $61 million facility rebuild, and nicknamed Beauty in the resort's Beauty and the Beast pairing with the Players Course.
Below these eight, the county keeps going for pages: stadium scale PGA West courses, mountain framed private clubs in Palm Desert, and older Classic era tracks that are pleasant without being essential. We say plainly that the back of a 57 course list in one valley is ordinary in places, because density is not the same as depth. The top, though, is real. A county where the eighth best course hosted a Skins Game is a county that got to choose its golf history, and mostly chose well.
The desert bench is ranked town by town in our La Quinta town ranking, where several of these courses fight it out directly.