Praia D’El Rey Golf & Beach Resort

Translated by AI

When Praia D’El Rey, one of Europe’s top golf courses, turned 20, it was celebrated with the “birth” of a cocky playmate and daughter, West Cliffs, a world-class links course.

The shortest distance between the two courses, Praia D’El Rey and West Cliffs, is barely a 5-iron, and right there you can catch a little glimpse of the neighbor. That is all, because Praia D’El Rey has placed West Cliffs at a safe distance within the impressive stretch of land on the Silver Coast, just under an hour’s drive north of Lisbon, that the company owns. The area is big enough to hold both courses with their clubhouses and luxury hotels without the visitor having the slightest feeling of crowding or of hearing a “fore” from the neighboring course.

It was the American golf architect Cabell B Robinson who designed Praia D’El Rey, and after the opening in 1997 he observed:

“This is the kind of landscape we architects try to create, but at Praia D’El Rey everything is already natural.”

The course was soon ranked among the world’s hundred best golf courses, a position it has kept over the years.

Perhaps it was not the plan from the start, but the idea of a one-hundred-percent links course by the Atlantic happened to coincide with Praia D’El Rey’s 20th anniversary. The young architect Cynthia Dye McGarey was given the job of designing West Cliffs, and she got roughly the same opportunity Cabell B Robinson had had twenty years earlier: to design a course without, in principle, disturbing a single blade of grass too many.

With the help of the municipal planning department, and after thorough reviews with several ministries, she was able to more or less weave her way between dinosaur fossils, natural drainage areas and groves of stone pines and create a world-class links course.

In June 2017 Praia D’El Rey celebrated its 20th anniversary and at the same time opened the new West Cliffs links.

Both West Cliffs and Praia D’El Rey are championship class but at the same time easily accessible to the average golfer. A visit here on the Atlantic coast may not compare with the Algarve’s well-stocked candy store of first-class golf courses, but for anyone looking for more than golf, the Silver Coast offers an impressive range.

For one thing, there are vacation homes and villas to rent if you don’t want to splurge on a more luxurious stay at the five-star Marriott Hotel next to the Praia D’El Rey course. For another, other sights are close by. Óbidos is only a quarter of an hour’s drive from Praia D’El Rey and Sintra about an hour away, and both towns are today on UNESCO’s World Heritage map.

Both West Cliffs and Praia D’El Rey have also invested in lots of other activities and offer paddling, scuba diving, surfing, seven tennis courts and bike rental, to name just a few.

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