Costa da Prata – The Silver Coast
Translated by AI
Costa da Prata, the Silver Coast: a really good choice for a weekend in Portugal when winter pulls down the blinds up north and everything goes into hibernation.
Just an hour’s drive north of Lisbon airport, more than ten championship courses are waiting. As the name Costa da Prata suggests, the Atlantic is never more than an arm’s length away, with everything that means for the golf.
Here you have the warmth, the dunes, the sea air and the pine forests. All the ingredients for first-class courses where the grass grows year-round, and where links courses can be complemented by parkland and woodland courses.
The area around Óbidos, a town on UNESCO’s World Heritage list and well worth some serious sightseeing, became our base when we picked four courses on the Silver Coast. Praia D’El Rey was a given, as was the newly opened links course West Cliffs. To these we added Royal Óbidos and Bom Sucesso. Abracadabra, we had four top courses within 15 minutes of each other!
Our aim was not only to test the courses but also to look at the accommodation and at interesting excursions for anyone who comes along without playing golf every day. So we spent a couple of nights at Praia D’El Rey’s five-star Marriott Hotel and a couple of nights in Royal Óbidos’s self-catering villas.
The verdict? Well, all the luxury the Marriott offers is certainly nice, but the villas are nothing to sneeze at either. Next time it will probably be four nights in a villa, a little easier on the wallet than the luxury hotel and a little more intimate.
We also had time to visit the neighboring towns of Óbidos and Sintra, two towns with a fantastic history that has been preserved in everything from houses and streets to folk traditions.
Perhaps the most striking thing, as I sum up my impressions, is what a gold mine(!) the Silver Coast is, wrapped in Atlantic winds and only about five hours from the rather gray winters of northern Europe. We got our fill of fantastic golf, stayed comfortably and enjoyed the warmth of the Silver Coast, where winter daytime temperatures average 17°C (63°F) and summer temperatures hover around 27°C (81°F).
As an alternative to the Algarve further south and Spain’s Costa del Sol, the Silver Coast gets very high marks.
Courses we tested
This article by Bo Sjosten was originally published in Swedish on our sister site Golfjournalen.se. It has been translated by AI.
