Golf Course Architecture - Issue 56: April 2019

62 ON S I TE Golf course architect Todd Eckenrode’s naturalistic approach has paid dividends for the new Twin Dolphin layout, as Adam Lawrence reports Natural selection TWIN DOLPHIN GOLF CLUB, LOS CABOS, MEX ICO L os Cabos, on the southern tip of Mexico’s Baja California, has been a popular tourist destination for Americans for many years. Initially a mainstream destination – popular for spring break trippers, with many resorts aimed at that market – Cabo became of interest to golfers when the Ocean course at Cabo del Sol, one of the Nicklaus company’s most successful designs, opened in 1994. Further golf followed, but it’s in the last ten years that the twenty miles of coast between the towns of San Jose del Cabo and Cabo San Lucas has truly become a golfing hotbed, with the opening ofTom Fazio’s Chileno Bay and Nicklaus’s Quivira, and the Diamante community (both actually to the west of San Jose del Cabo) with its dramatic Dunes course by Paul Cowley and Davis Love III’s firm, and El Cardonal, the first Tiger Woods course to make it to opening day (designed, as has been all of Tiger’s work so far, principally by architect Beau Welling). What the area has also seen over the last few years is a definite shift upmarket. Those spring breakers are still there, but with the new golf courses all incorporating expensive real estate or resort components (or both), the Cabo scene is definitely changing. And the latest new development to hit the market, the Twin Dolphin golf course and its associated facilities, located between Photo: Evan Schiller Photography