Barbados
Sandy Lane
The exclusive Sandy Lane resort is home to two championship golf courses (and a nine-holer), and was famously the venue where Tiger Woods and his former wife Elin Nordegren tied the knot in a lavish ceremony back in 2004. Woods, who booked out the entire 112-room resort, spent a reported US$3 million on the occasion.
Like everything at Sandy Lane, the golf courses have been landscaped to a high standard. The Country Club is a parkland layout, featuring several man-made lakes and some challenging approach shots to greens well protected by water and sand. Holes six and seven are particularly sweet, and it has nothing to do with the fact that plumes of smoke can be seen rising from a nearby distillery busily converting cane juice into rum, the islanders’ tipple of choice.
Sandy Lane's other course, the Green Monkey, has so far remained hidden from the golfing public. It's like the Mona Lisa of golf – enigmatic, untouchable and only available to the well-heeled guests of the resort.
"The vision of the owners,” says course architect Tom Fazio, “was to create a place as dramatic as any there is in the world.” Created and sculpted from what was once a working limestone quarry, Fazio slowly builds drama through the first eight parkland-style holes, and then startles golfers with a rapid descent into the aforementioned quarry, where 27-metre high coral walls dwarf the fairways.
From the remarkable 578-metre 9th where you drive from a high tee to a fairway 150 feet below, to the flags that feature a green monkey with an extended curled tail that flutters in the breeze – everything at the Green Monkey is about grandeur and detail.
The signature hole, the 206-metre par-three 16th, has become one of the world's most photographed golf holes. From another elevated tee, players hit down to a green edged by a massive bunker featuring a grass island carved in the shape of a Bajan green monkey, a species introduced to the island from West Africa more than 350 years ago and the inspiration for the course name.
Contact: www.sandylane.com
