Top 5 famous golf courses

For golfers, the place in which you play can make a huge difference to your game. There are hundreds of beautiful golf courses throughout the world, with avid fans travelling across the globe in order to experience all that these premier greens have to offer.

But with so many to choose from, where do you decide to go first? In case you’re putting together your bucket list of places to play, we’ve rounded up five of the best golf courses in the world.

Pebble Beach, USA.

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America is home to some fantastic courses, with a number of them topping charts across the world. Pebble Beach in California is one of the most well-known of them all, located on the rocky shores of the Pacific coastline. Anyone can pay the green fee to play at Pebble Beach, allowing a much wider variety of people to enjoy this fine course. Experts recommend enjoying holes five to eight, with their exciting water hazards, as well as making the most of the panoramic ocean views on offer when you play at Pebble Beach. According to the Telegraph, Jack Nicklaus said that if he only had one more round to play in his life, he would play it at Pebble Beach.

Royal Melbourne, Australia.

According to experts, the course at the Royal Melbourne is one of the finest in the southern hemisphere. Since it was first designed over 80 years ago, the East and West courses at the Royal Melbourne have been attracting players from across the world. This private club features deceptively simple looking fairways, but make no mistake - the strategic design of the course means that only the best manage to achieve a great score when playing at the Royal Melbourne.

St Andrews, Scotland.

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Golf has been played in St Andrews for generations and generations and, for many people, playing on the Old Course at St Andrews is a lifelong dream. As one of the oldest and most famous courses in the country, the Old Course is nestled in stormy dunes near the North Sea, and is known to present a challenge to even the most professional of players. If you don’t want to push it then check out the four other 18-hole courses available, or even try the 9-hole course.

Cape Kidnappers, New Zealand.

Based on the easterly edge of New Zealand’s North Island, the course at Cape Kidnappers boasts one of the most beautiful and dramatic locations on the planet. With fairways jutting out on rocky ledges high above the Pacific, on what was once a 5,000-acre sheep station, this harsh landscape is well suited to the trials and tribulations that occur whilst playing the course. The Telegraph say that “players must contend with fearsome ravines, contoured fairways and fast, tilted greens”, all while soaking in the truly incredible landscape in which it is based.

Muirfield, Scotland.

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The golf course at Muirfield is one of the oldest and most famous courses in the world, regularly hosting tournaments from amateurs to professionals and large international events. 16 Open championships have been played at Muirfield, with the course often ranked as one of the fairest of all of the champion fairways, thanks to its lack of sneaky bumps and bunkers. Golf Monthly magazine even named Muirfield number one in its chart of the top 100 golf courses in the UK and Ireland, highlighting the prowess of this historic course.