Some golf courses are celebrated for their enigmatic character, for the way they don’t reveal themselves to you fully — at least not right away. Those layouts, whether Golden Age classics or modern marvels, gradually enlighten golfers over time. They divulge their secrets slowly across multiple rounds; and it’s only after many attempts playing and studying those fairways and greens that golfers come to understand what’s required to play well there.
The championship golf course at Finca Cortesin in Casares, Spain, is not one of those courses.
By the time you walk off the first green, you’ll have a general understanding of what’s in store for the rest of your round. Once you’ve played the first third of the layout, you’ll definitely know.
Following my initial round, as I sat down for a bite to eat at the resort’s poolside restaurant, I was joined by José “Nacho” Ignacio Olea Zorita, Finca Cortesin’s director of golf. Almost immediately, our conversation reinforced my initial impressions of the course.
“How did you play today?” he asked. “And how many balls did you lose?”
On their own merit, those two questions could be mutually exclusive. Most of the time at Finca Cortesin, however, they’re causally linked.
I told him that I played pretty well — I had posted a score of 76, four over par, which by my standards is a pretty solid round of golf. As for his second inquiry, I held up a single finger.
“Oh, you did play well!” he declared.
In most instances, a player’s final score tells the story. Not at Finca Cortesin. It was abundantly clear that Olea was more impressed by my second answer than the first.
Stretching beyond 7,400 yards from the tips, Finca Cortesin’s championship golf course is a Cabell Robinson design, circa 2006, which gradually trundles uphill and down; however, there are a few occasions where the changes in elevation are more severe. It’s a good mix of doglegs in both directions, too, with a handful of blind shots thrown in for good measure.
“It’s not particularly narrow,” Olea said of the course, and he’s right. The playing corridors, especially the landing areas, are comfortably wide. That is, so long as you play from the appropriate set of tees relative to how far you can hit it.
“For a low-handicapper or an amateur with some distance, if they’re going to play the course more than once, I always tell them to play the first round from the yellow tees just to get an eye and a feel for it,” Olea said. “Then, on their second round, they should move back to the whites. But if that same player, who might be hitting the ball 260, 270 or 280 yards off the tee, is only going to have one go at it, I always tell them to play the whites. The course is going to bite you, but it’s not a beast. And many times I’ll even recommend that they try a combo, where they play from the whites and then the yellows on the par-3s.”
Playing from the tees that allow you to hit driver to those generously sized landing areas is crucial, since it’s what’s looming on the playing corridors’ periphery that poses a problem. At Finca, very few holes run parallel to one another. Dense vegetation also lines the edges of the playing fields, which means balls that are sprayed to the left or right — or even shots that flirt with the edge and take a bad first bounce — are likely to be lost.
According to Nicolas Colsaerts, who won the last of three Volvo World Match Play Championships contested at Finca Cortesin (in 2012), the course clearly shows you the shots that Robinson intended golfers to hit at various points throughout the round. That’s particularly true on approach shots, given that some greens are comprised of sections distinctly separated by bold contours. Across those sections, the putting surfaces may only slope by a degree or two, but here, less than two miles from the Alboran Sea, the grip and pull of the Bermuda’s grain was unlike anything I had experienced anywhere else.
“The mid-sized greens are where it actually gets quite spicy,” Olea said. “With the grain from the Bermuda grass, it makes some subtle slopes very interesting.”
Understanding the pull of the greens, the positioning of the most generous landing zones for each hole and the inherent risks that certain shots carry isn’t something that comes overnight, even if the course reveals much of that up front. Being aware of those characteristics and adapting your game to accommodate them are two entirely separate undertakings. It’s for that reason that Finca Cortesin’s members enjoy a significant home-field advantage during local, inter-club matches. “Usually, the members from other clubs get scared of the left, they get scared of the right, and they’re scared of the grain on the greens,” Olea said. “Our members usually cruise through those matches.”
Neither team cruised to victory when Finca Cortesin hosted the Solheim Cup in 2023. The Americans went to bed with a two-point lead after the first day of competition, but the event’s score was tied 8-to-8 after day two and finished in a draw, 14-to-14, after the final single matches concluded.
Similarly, in 1997, when the Ryder Cup was held at nearby Real Club Valderrama, the Europeans narrowly pulled out a one-point victory. Needless to say, the Costa del Sol region of Spain boasts an impressive history for elite match-play competition, but that underscores the significant role that golf, in general, plays in the region. With 85 venues in the area, Costa del Sol boasts the highest density of golf courses across all of continental Europe, which is why, in the right company, the region is referred to by another nickname: Costa del Golf.
Within this region, Finca Cortesin, Valderrama and Real Club de Golf Sotogrande form a triumvirate of unparalleled golf. The latter, in Olea’s estimation, is a fabulous parkland course that perhaps plays most like a resort course of the three. Valderrama, on the other hand, challenges players in ways that Finca cannot. Its narrow, tree-lined fairways are certain to provide visual intimidation; and while you’re unlikely to lose golf balls for wayward shots the way you can at Finca Cortesin, well-struck shots at Valderrama can sometimes introduce unique challenges of their own.
“You may hit a very good tee shot and find that you’re behind a tree in the center of the fairway,” Olea said. “It’s a different problem to have.”
Playing all three courses while you’re in this region, about 45 miles south of the city of Malaga, is a must; however, the sequence of those rounds is up to you. As for where to stay, there may be no better home base than Finca Cortesin. Modeled after a palatial country house for the nobility, the 67-room hotel is a fascinating dichotomy of old and new. The general feeling that you get inside the hotel, its restaurants and spa is one of modernity, which is to be expected given that the entire structure was designed and built less than two decades ago.
Yet, seemingly everywhere you turn, ancient decorative accents — from artwork to massive wooden doors — inject the property with a strong sense of history. Better still, the resort operates predominantly as a lifestyle and wellness retreat that just so happens to have a world-class golf course, not the other way around.
Golf, of course, can be a primary motivation for some guests who visit the region, and the three aforementioned courses work together to promote the experience that the avid golfer can have visiting Costa del Sol. “We consider ourselves a destination,” Olea said.
The same can be said for Finca Cortesin, itself.
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