83 I suspect this will be controversial, as it completely blinds that part of the green, unless the golfer has hit their second hard to the right side. It is strategic for sure, but I don’t think it will be loved. The seventeenth is a short and pretty par three, while the home hole has overtones of the eighth at Pine Valley, because Bowman has chosen to build two greens, separated by an enormous bunker. It should be said that there is more that could be done at Alcaidesa Links (it’s not a links, of course, but given how little Costa golf is on the sea, perhaps we can forgive the name). There are a number of spots on the course where if Bowman is given time and budget for some additional regrading, it would help. But for all that, there will not be many more compelling golfing experiences on the Costa del Sol. Bowman’s greens are dramatic, but not, in pinnable areas at least, especially severe. There are a number of quite spectacular sucker pins: for example, the area that connects the double green of the fifth and thirteenth could easily be used for the fifth pin, and it would be remarkable, if a little brutal on the part of the pinsetter. I find it remarkable that neither I, nor my fellow guest, Jim McCann of top100golfcourses.com, one of the besttravelled of British golf writers, knew anything about Alcaidesa before we visited. It is, without a doubt, the most dramatic piece of golfing property I have seen on the Costa del Sol, and no matter how good Kurt Bowman’s work there, he did not create that drama. Yet drama and severity are two sides of the same coin, and, as with many courses in the area, there is no getting away from the fact that the site is quite severe. It is not, for example, a course that anyone short of a masochistic mountain goat would choose to walk, and I do fervently believe that golf was intended to be a walking game. But it is absolutely to Bowman’s credit that he has, within a pretty stringent set of constraints imposed upon him by the circumstances of the development, found a way to tame that severity, at least to the point of making the golf course eminently playable. He – and the rest of the team that has been working at Alcaidesa – should get a lot of credit for that. GCA “ There are a number of quite spectacular sucker pins” Photo: Gary Lisbon HAC I ENDA ALCAIDESA The fifth (foreground) shares its heavily contoured double green with the par-four thirteenth
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