The Most Scenic Holes at Quivira Golf Club

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the bombshell beauty of a few seaside courses is self-evident and irrefutable. Quivira is such a golf course. The routing devised by designer Jack Nicklaus has great pace and variety, but it’s also sprinkled with a quartet of jaw-dropping, vertigo-inducing holes that remain long in a player’s memory. Not just for their challenge, which can be quite firm if the wind is up, but for their incomparable Land’s End settings.

Golfers may say it’s all about the shots and the score, but they’re easily seduced by spectacular settings. This is especially true at Quivira, which skirts sheer granite cliffs high above the sea on both nines. Lights, camera, action!

Here’s our pick of Quivira’s most scenic holes. All yardages are from the black tees.

No. 6, Par 4, 310 yards
After scaling the side of a mountain, players arrive at this beguiling short par 4 set 275 feet above sea level. Slanted below a massive dune on the right, the tilted fairway traces a cliff’s edge to the left before plunging downhill to a rock-walled green cantilevered over the ocean. A large deep bunker defends the left side of the putting surface. “It’s a very exciting little hole,” Nicklaus said. “You can lay up off the tee and play a short shot down to the green; or you can try to drive the green.” While it’s far from conventional, Jack believes “people have learned to love it because of the uniqueness of it. It’s something you certainly are not going to create unless you’re on the ocean.”

No. 7, Par 3, 180 yards
Carved into the base of what Nicklaus described as a ”beautiful sand valley” walled in by an enormous dune, this breathtaking par 3, one of the most spectacular one-shotters Jack has ever built, is perched on cliffs 200 feet above a rocky beach and the churning sea. Faced into the prevailing wind, the tee shot must find and hold a deep, narrow, two-tiered green that drops off to a cavernous bunker and sheer oblivion on the left. Shots played safely to the right away from danger will often kick off a slope below the cart path and feed onto the green. Nicklaus provides sideboards and containment mounds at Quivira to assist risk-averse players.

No. 13, Par 5, 635 yards
The longest hole on the course, this colossal downhill par 5 is a Z-shaped, double-dogleg that drops from the top of a dune and zigzags along an island-style fairway bounded on both sides by sand and ball-swallowing vegetation. The green, tucked to the left of the sinuous fairway, is narrow, very deep (40 yards!) and bunker-less. From any set of tees, this magnificent par 5, a true original, is a three-shot hole. Many of the key battle scenes in “Troy,” the epic swords-and-sandals movie starring Brad Pitt as Achilles, were filmed not in Greece but on a broad stretch of deserted beach below the green of this majestic hole, the toughest test of grit and skill at Quivira.

No. 14, Par 3, 148 yards
Quivira’s longest hole is followed by its shortest, a petite, do-or-die par 3 that exhausts all superlatives. The shelf-like green sits atop a massive pinnacle of steel-gray granite that rises over 100 feet from a beach washed by crashing waves. There’s a bailout area to the left of the green, one of the smallest Nicklaus has ever built, but this midget of a hole, only a wedge or 9-iron from the forward tees, calls for an unerring shot over an abyss to the slickest green on the course. The mown slope to the left of the putting surface generally directs conservative shots onto the green. Holes-in-ones are not uncommon on this splendid little charmer.

Book your next Cabo visit and reserve your tee time for a day of glorious golf!