# The Best Golf Courses in San Clemente

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-san-clemente-ca/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / California


A leading golf course in California. Photo: WilliamFMeyer, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

San Clemente is a surf town that happens to keep a golf course on a hillside above the break. That is the whole bench here, nearly: one municipal course the town argues about like family, one daily fee course in the master planned hills, and one private club. Three courses is a thin list, and this post will not pretend otherwise. But the muni at the top of it is the kind of course rankings exist to find, a Billy Bell design on ocean view ground, priced for the people who live under it.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. In a town this size, access is not a tiebreaker. It is close to the whole game.

## 1San Clemente Municipal Golf Course

Billy Bell built golf all over Southern California in the game's early decades, and his San Clemente muni climbs a hillside with the Pacific spread out below it, hole after hole playing toward or across a view that private clubs charge initiation fees to match. The town prices it for residents first, which is exactly right, and everyone else pays a fair rate to walk the same ground. The layout uses its slope honestly: sidehill lies, elevated tees, greens that ask you to think about where the ocean breeze is going to push a high ball.

The concession is the one every beloved muni carries. Conditioning runs to municipal budgets, the tee sheet is a knife fight in good weather, and the argument about whether the town spends enough on its course is a standing item in local politics, priced for residents, argued over by everyone, as it should be. None of that touches the core fact. A public hillside course by a period architect, over the Pacific, in a town of this size, is a genuine civic asset, and it wins this list on golf, setting, and access at once. Rare sweep.

## 2Talega Golf Club

Talega is the modern daily fee option in the hills of the Talega development, a polished, full service round of the kind the muni does not attempt: practice facilities, a real clubhouse, conditioning a step up, and a layout routed through the community's canyon edges with the ocean in the distance. For a visiting golfer who wants the day handled, Talega is the easy booking in San Clemente.

It ranks second because polish is purchasable and Bell's hillside is not. Talega's golf is good, modern, and somewhat interchangeable with the better daily fee courses up and down the Orange County coast, while the muni could exist nowhere else. Play Talega for the complete product. Play the muni for San Clemente.

## 3Shorecliffs Golf Club

Shorecliffs is the private option, a members' club in the coastal hills that has served its neighborhood for decades, valued by the people inside the gate for the ease of the life around the golf as much as for the course itself. The golf is pleasant coastal parkland, kept for members, and by every local account the club does its job well.

Third is what a ranking owes a course it cannot send you to, in a town where the public option is this strong. Shorecliffs might be the best conditioned round in San Clemente on a given morning. It cannot be the town's best course in any sense that matters to a reader, because the town cannot play it. The muni on the hill, wind up and tee sheet full, is the answer here, and San Clemente is lucky its best golf is the golf everyone gets.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.