Town Rankings / California

The Best Golf Courses in Santa Barbara

Ask a visitor to name Santa Barbara golf and they name the ocean course. Ask a local where the real test is and a good number of them point inland, up the highway toward Lompoc, to a course with no beach in its photographs and a wind that does not care about your vacation. This ranking sides with the locals, and it is not particularly close.

The Santa Barbara bench is public from top to bottom, which shapes everything. No private club hides behind a gate here, hoarding the best land. What you get instead is a coastal showpiece, two solid hometown courses, and one inland bruiser that borrows the town's name on rankings lists despite sitting a full drive away. The golf comes first in our order. Postcards come second.

1La Purisima Golf Course Lompoc

La Purisima is the harder, windier test, and the locals who rank it first are right. It sits inland near Lompoc, in open country where the afternoon wind is a design feature whether the architect planned it or not, and it plays long and exposed and honest. There is nowhere to hide a weak shot. The ball has to be struck, then struck again.

The concession: it is a drive, a real one, and if your Santa Barbara trip is built around State Street dinners and a beach hotel, La Purisima asks for half a day and some commitment. The setting, for all its scale, is farmland and sky rather than bluff and surf. None of that changes the golf. Hole for hole, this is the sternest examination within reach of Santa Barbara, and examinations are what rankings are for.

2Sandpiper Golf Club

Sandpiper's back nine runs the bluffs above Goleta, and for about an hour of golf it gives you the coastline the brochures promise, holes where the Pacific is not a backdrop but a hazard in your head on every swing. Played in the late light, it is the best looking round in this article and it is not close.

Here is the concession, and it matters. The inland holes do not live at the same level as the bluff holes, so the round arrives in two registers, very good and then suddenly extraordinary, then it ends. That split personality keeps it second. A course cannot be half a great course and top a list, even when the great half is this good.

3Santa Barbara Golf Club

The city course is the town's everyday golf, the muni where Santa Barbara actually plays, and it does the job with more charm than most munis manage. It is walkable, reasonably priced by coastal California standards, and busy for a reason. Locals learn the game here, then defend it for life.

Nobody would call it a tougher test than the two courses above it, and we will not either. Conditioning and ambition both run a clear step below Sandpiper. What it has is belonging. Third place, held with affection, is the right spot.

4Glen Annie Golf Club

Glen Annie, up in the Goleta foothills, trades ocean frontage for elevation and views back over the coast, and on a clear day the setting does real work. The golf is a tier below the rest of this list, more forgiving in places and less memorable in others, the kind of course a group plays happily without arguing about afterward.

That is its concession and its role. Not every course in a town has to be an argument. Glen Annie is the relaxed round, the one you book when the trip is about the company.

Go to Sandpiper for the photographs if you must. Then drive inland, let the wind push your ball around for four hours at La Purisima, and find out which round you are still talking about at dinner.