Golf travel
Golf in Saint Lucia
Three golf courses on a volcanic Caribbean island, two of them within a few minutes of each other at the northern tip: a Coore & Crenshaw clifftop masterpiece ranked inside the world's top 25 that you have to ask permission to play, and a genuinely public Greg Norman 18 next door.
Dry season December–May, sweet spot mid-January to April. Atlantic hurricane season runs 1 June to 30 November, statistical peak 10 September
Saint Lucia is not a golf island in the way Barbados or the Dominican Republic are golf islands. It has three courses in total — and the reason it suddenly matters is that two of them sit within a few minutes of each other in Cap Estate, at the island's northern tip. One is Point Hardy Golf Club at Cabot Saint Lucia, a Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw layout that debuted at 23rd on Golf Digest's World's 100 Greatest Courses and is a private members' club most visitors will never tee up on. The other, five minutes away, is a Greg Norman redesign that anyone can book.
That contrast is the whole trip. Around it you get a genuinely spectacular island: the Pitons Management Area, a UNESCO World Heritage Site inscribed in 2004, rising out of the sea at Soufrière; the sulphur springs and rainforest of the volcanic interior; Rodney Bay and Gros Islet in the north, where the hotels, restaurants and marina are, and where the Friday night street party has been running for more than fifty years. Our Saint Lucia guide covers Cabot Saint Lucia in full — what access actually looks like, what is built and what is still a construction hoarding — plus the two Sandals courses, when to come, and why the airport transfer takes twice as long as you have been told.