Golf Club Salinas de Antigua – Review and Rating

Translated by AI

The Salinas course is tough, with lots of lava and plenty of sand.

Picture yourself hitting off on the first hole, a fairly gentle par 5, surrounded by lava rocks and, more often than not, a strong north wind. The view of the ocean is fantastic, though, when the sun is out, which it usually is. And the ball flies far over the lava dunes and onto the fairway…

The Salinas course, which is of medium length, has an exciting layout with good routing. From the yellow tees it measures 5,105 meters, from the red tees 4,292. The course has only three par 5s, measuring 434 to 464 meters from the yellow tees and 351 to 425 meters from the red. Ten par 4s vary in length from 265 to 364 meters from the yellow tees and from 225 to 301 meters from the red. The short holes measure 126 to 161 meters from the yellow tees and 79 to 112 meters from the red.

The fairways are fairly worn by drought and wind, and so are the greens, even though the same grass is used across the whole course and it is watered with three thousand cubic meters of water a day. The remarkable thing is the bunkers, which are large and numerous, close to a hundred of them.

As you can tell, the slope rating is not particularly gentle. Club manager Roberto S Gomez says, however, that they have tried to create a course where most players can reach the green in two on a par 4. That said, some of the handful of ponds in the line of play make for many tricky doglegs on the map. And it is easy to end up in the lava rough.

Holes three, four and five are considered signature holes, and one of them has a World War II fortification in the line of play. All in all, the final verdict is a clear pass for this course, which could still do with a little better maintenance.

This page by Boje Bengtsson was originally published in Swedish on our sister site Golfjournalen.se. It has been translated by AI.