Cabo Del Sol Golf Club (Ocean Course) - Mexico

Cabo del Sol's Ocean Course may well be the best Course ever designed by Jack Nicklaus and the setting-in Mexico's Baja Desert, overlooking the splendor of the Pacific where Cortez once stood, is certainly one of the most bedazzling. Not long ago, the tip of the Baja Peninsula was an area visited only by serious fishermen in search of trophy marlin and billfish. Nowadays, Los Cabos, or "the Capes," the 20-mile stretch between the sleepy 17th-century mission village of San Jose del Cabo and the rowdy late-night bars of Cabo San Lucas, has become Mexico's top golf destination, with superb courses blossoming in the dessert. Opened in 1994, Coba del Sol is a memorable excursion thought the profusion of the desert - organ-pine and paddle cacti, palo verde, ironwood, wild plum, and fig trees-punctuated by peppermint fairways that spill onto the rocky coast surrounded by the searingly blue sea. The par-five 15th fans out to the Pacific and the lighthouse on cabeza ballena, or "whale's head," overlooking the waters where the right and gray whales spend the winter after their long migration from Alaska. Nicklaus has called the 16th through 18th three of the best ocean finishing holes in the world, with the par-three 17th playing over the sandy scimitar of beach to a raised green barricaded by the pink and gray sea rocks.

Cabo Real Golf Club - Mexico

Cabo Real Golf Club is another Baja beauty in the Mexican golf constellation of Los Cabos. Designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr. and opened in 1993, Cabo Real combines tropical seaside with mountain golf. Cabo Real's front nine climbs through the burnt orange ridges of the Sierra de la Laguna Mountains, with fairways careening along desert canyons. The more open back nine descends to the sea, with the par-three 12th plunging downhill, but not before taking in the long view out to the Pacific below. The par-three 15th plays across a powder puff of beach to a green that runs up to the backyard of the Las Ventanas al Paraiso Hotel. Of all the sybaritic resorts that line "The Corridor" between Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo, the most luxurious is Las Ventanas, its white adobes sprinkled around a sinuous lagoon of a swimming pool that runs through a desert garden of palms and barrel cactus out to the sea.