Town Rankings / Florida
The Best Golf Courses in West Palm Beach
West Palm Beach had a tired municipal course on good sandy ground, the kind of place every Florida city owns and apologizes for. Then the city did the thing cities almost never do. It handed the ground to Gil Hanse's team, backed the rebuild with private philanthropy, kept the course municipally owned, and opened The Park in 2023 with a sliding scale access mission, a par 3 course, a putting course, and junior golf programming built in from the start. It changed what a city course can be, and it changed this ranking with it, because a muni now sits at the top of a Palm Beach County list on the golf alone.
A note on the list itself: this town's ballot names the new course twice, once as The Park West Palm and once under the golf park name the site carried into its new life, West Palm Golf Park. Same ground, same Hanse design, one course. We rank it once, at No. 1, and rank the town's real second and third options behind it. Anything else would be counting the best course in town twice and calling it depth.
1The Park West Palm (West Palm Golf Park)
Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner designed The Park on the former West Palm Beach municipal course site, opened 2023, municipally owned and community focused. The playing character is the story: sandy, firm and fast, unusual for South Florida munis and unusual for South Florida, period, in a region where public golf usually means soft turf, target greens, and a pond every other hole. Hanse built a course that asks you to run the ball, use the ground, and think a shot ahead, then surrounded it with the par 3 course, the putting course, and the junior programming that make the place busy in the right way, with people learning the game inside the fence of the best course in town.
Access is part of the architecture here. Resident favorable pricing and a mission funded to keep it that way mean the best round in West Palm Beach is also the most democratic one, and our scoring, golf first, then the day, then access and value, rewards exactly that combination. The concession: popularity is the tax. The Park is busy, booked, and talked about, and a quiet weekday walk is harder to come by than the design invites you to imagine. Newness is the other question mark. The course opened in 2023 and its reputation is still being written by the golfers playing it now. On the evidence so far, they are writing a strong one.
2Okeeheelee Golf Course
Okeeheelee is Palm Beach County's 27 hole public course, three nines inside Okeeheelee Park, designed by Roy Case and opened in 1995. If The Park is the city's showcase, Okeeheelee is the county's workhorse: popular with juniors and leagues, priced for the public, and built to absorb the sheer volume of golf a county this size plays every week.
Twenty seven holes is a real advantage. Rotation keeps the golf fresher than a single overplayed 18, and the park setting gives the round room to breathe. Okeeheelee ranks second rather than first because the design ceiling is lower, and it is not close on that measure: Case built a solid, playable public course, Hanse built one of the most discussed munis in America. But across a season, the county golfer's actual life runs through Okeeheelee, its leagues, its junior programs, its Saturday rotations, and a ranking that ignored that would be grading brochures instead of golf towns.
3Madison Green Country Club
Madison Green closes the list as the semi private community option on the western side of the county's golf map, the kind of course that anchors a neighborhood's weekly golf: member play, public play around it, and a full country club setup for the community built around it. It gets the least room here because its case is the most local. Nothing in its record argues with a Hanse redesign or with the county's 27 hole workhorse, and we will not inflate a community course into a destination.
What it does is complete the town's picture. West Palm Beach golf, on this list, is a nationally talked about muni, a county facility that teaches the game at scale, and a neighborhood club course holding down its side of the county. For the golfer who lives in that neighborhood, Madison Green is not third in anything. It is Tuesday. And a town whose Tuesday golf is this varied, at these prices, with a Hanse course on top, is a town that has its golf sorted better than richer neighbors up and down the coast.
The last light at The Park catches the sand first, and the putting course is still full of kids an hour after the final tee time on the big course has gone out. That image is the ranking, really. West Palm Beach bet its municipal ground on design and access at the same time, and the bet is paying out in public.