Town Rankings / California
The Best Golf Courses in Santa Cruz
Most golf towns have a pecking order you can argue about in a bar. Santa Cruz has a monument and then everything else. Tucked into the hills above the city sits the course Alister MacKenzie built and then chose to live beside, his house off the 6th fairway, which tells you what the man who co-created Augusta National thought of his own work here.
The rest of the town's golf is public, scrappy, and set in redwood country, and it should not be judged against the monument. It should be judged as the supporting cast it is. This list ranks three courses. One of them belongs in a national conversation. The other two belong in a conversation about what local golfers actually need, which is cheaper golf five minutes from home.
1Pasatiempo Golf Club
Pasatiempo is described, accurately, as the best public access MacKenzie in America, and that sentence alone settles this ranking. MacKenzie lived off the 6th fairway. He did not commute to a masterpiece, he settled next to one, and the course still shows why: bunkering with real artistry in it, greens that punish the lazy angle and reward the brave one, and a back nine that works through a barranca with the kind of natural drama architects since have tried to fake with bulldozers and budgets.
The concessions are price and access pressure. It is expensive for public golf, tee times are fought over, and the front nine, played through a residential hillside, is merely very good next to a back nine that is close to perfect. Say all of that out loud and the ranking does not move a single place. This is a top tier American course that happens to let you book it, sitting above a surf town. Play it once before you argue with anything else on this page.
Understand what that access means in practice. The other MacKenzie courses golfers talk about in this breath sit behind membership committees. This one sits behind a tee sheet. The strategy MacKenzie drew into these holes, the bunkers staggered to change the value of every yard of position, is available to anyone who plans ahead and pays the fee, which makes Pasatiempo less a course than a loophole in American golf: the Golden Age, bookable by the public, an hour and a half from San Francisco.
2DeLaveaga Golf Course
DeLaveaga is Santa Cruz's municipal course, cut through the redwoods in the hills above town, and it is a genuinely tricky little test: tight in places, sloped, the kind of course where local knowledge is worth real strokes and first timers donate golf balls to the canyon and call it tuition.
The concession is scale and polish. It is a muni, with a muni's conditioning and a muni's pace on a Saturday, and nobody who has played Pasatiempo in the morning will confuse the two in the afternoon. But as a value round in a beautiful, unlikely setting, it earns second place here without apology. This is where Santa Cruz plays.
3Seascape Golf Club Aptos
Seascape, down the coast in Aptos, is the relaxed option: coastal air, a friendlier test, the round you book for a mixed group where half the foursome plays twice a year. It sits near the water without ever really using it the way the great coastal courses do, which is both its charm and its ceiling.
There is no shame in third here. Seascape does not pretend to be Pasatiempo, and a town's third course that knows exactly what it is, an easy day near the ocean, is doing its job properly.
The last word belongs to the house off the 6th fairway. The greatest architect of his era could have lived beside any course he touched, on two continents. He picked this hillside above Santa Cruz, and a century of golfers have been agreeing with him ever since.