It all began at Puerta de Hierro in 1904. When the dean of Madrid’s golf clubs and the first in the Peninsula opened its holes, there were only a handful of Spanish golfers in Spain. It would be 28 years before the opening of the second golf club in the province of Madrid, the Club de Campo, in the municipality of San Sebastián de los Reyes.
It would be almost 40 years before a third golf club, the RACE, came into being in what is now known as the Community of Madrid. From the 70’s onwards, the great growth of golf in Madrid would take place.
At present there are some thirty golf courses that make up a very varied offer for residents and tourists who come to the capital of Spain in their hundreds of thousands every year. You can play golf in the autonomous community from 9 euros for a pitch and putt to 200 euros for a weekend round at the Santander Golf Club. There are some top-notch courses that are very difficult to access for ordinary mortals, not because of money, but because they are strictly restricted to members and their guests.
That handful of golfers who began their adventures in Puerta de Hierro at the beginning of the last century has today become a large family of more than 80,000 players who account for almost a third of the total number of federated golfers in Spain. To see the strength of golf in Madrid, it is enough to compare its number of federation licenses with that of Catalonia (less than 30,000) and Andalusia (around 45,000), both communities with considerably more population than the first one.
Some of the Madrid courses bear the imprint of renowned designers, such as Jack Nicklaus, Javier Arana RACE, Pepe Gancedo remodeling La Herrería, Severiano Ballesteros, José María Olazábal (Retamares), Manuel Piñero La Dehesa and Pepín Rivero (Olivar de la Hinojosa). The Golden Bear, considered the best golfer in history, with 18 majors on his resume, is the author of the designs of the club with the largest golf offer in Spain: La Moraleja, with four 18-hole courses, one 9-hole course and a spectacular practice area. Nicklaus also came up with the design of one of the courses of the Club de Campo Villa de Madrid, while the other was the work of another of the greatest golfers in history: Seve. And the Golden Bear also designed La Moraleja Golf Club.
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