San Lorenzo Golf Club - Portugal

During the past 30 years, Portugal's southernmost province, the Algarve, has become a hotbed of golf, with splendid courses spread among modern hotels and whitewashed villas along the Atlantic. Of all the Algarve's courses, the most stunning is San Lorenzo, or Sao Lourenzo, one of four courses that make Quinto do Lago the Algarve's leading resort. Designed by the late Joe Lee and opened in 1988, the course straddles the western edge of the Ria Formosa Nature Reserve, a wetlands sanctuary for aquatic birds migrating from the Arctic to Africa. The elevated tee of the sixth hole offers a view of the fairway curving along the Ria's expansive salt marsh with a rickety wooden bridge leading out to the coastal dunes beyond. The seventh continues along the marsh, while the eighth and ninth skirt a large lagoon echoing with the cries of egrets, cranes, and purple gallinules, where once there had been a tomato field. The course returns to the lagoon on the 17th and 18th, with the final hale requiring a heroic shot across the lagoon to a headland of green. The course is named for the Church of Sao Lourenzo, one of the most beautiful of the blue-and-white-tiled churches in the Algarve, located just outside the nearby town of Almancil.

Vilamoura Golf Club (Old Course) - Portugal

Vilamoura Old, one of several courses at the resort complex of Vilamoura with its glitzy marina, is one of the oldest and indisputably one of the best courses in the Portuguese Algarve. Designed by Frank Pennink in 1969, the course is a superb example of strategic design in the English parkland style, with doglegs and tight bunkering through the umbrella pines. The four par threes are exceptionally good and distinct from one another, with the fourth playing over water to a green flanked by trees and the 10th requiring a carryover a ravine. Pennink also designed the delightful Palmares Golf Club, which is a few miles further west near Lagos, where outdoor cafes line the old harbor that was once the stronghold of Henry the Navigator during the 15th century.