December 3, 2006

New Courses Draw Golfers, and Criticism in Spain
By DALE FUCHS
Correction Appended

FORGET the Alhambra. Forget the Prado. When Albert Dobbeleir visits Spain, he is interested in only one thing: golf.

“I’ve been here for a week, and every single day I played on a different course,” Mr. Dobbeleir, a Belgian clothing manufacturer, said while loading his clubs onto a cart at the new Westin golf resort outside the Mediterranean town of Benidorm. He says he travels from Antwerp to Spain six times a year just to play.

“Back home it’s 48 degrees,” he said on a balmy November day, “but after a two-and-a-half-hour flight, I’m here in the sun.”

Mr. Dobbeleir is one of thousands of Northern Europeans who shuttle to Spain for warm golf weekends the way New York snowbirds migrate to Boca Raton.

Spain has become the Florida of Europe, a place where a polo-shirt-clad crowd can wield a five-iron in winter on a celebrity-designed fairway or retire to a $500,000 villa by the ninth hole.

Since 1990, more than 200 championship-level courses have opened throughout the country, from the misty hills of Galicia to the marshlands of Cádiz and rugged cliffs of Alicante, according to a study by Aymerich, a golf management consulting company based in Madrid.

Golfers can now tee off on a fairway lined with cactus in the Arizona-like desert of Almería, on the Mediterranean, or try for a hole-in-one nearly 1,000 feet above the ocean on the volcanic island of Tenerife, off the African coast. So many greens dot Málaga province — 40 in a 62-mile stretch at last count — that the Costa del Sol has acquired a new nickname: the Costa del Golf.

“In Andalusia, it’s a war to attract the tourists,” said an Aymerich spokesman, Juan Muro Aguilar, describing competing specials on greens fees.

Another 300 courses are planned for construction across the country in the next decade. Should municipal authorities give them all the green light despite severe water shortages and slowly mounting pressure from the environmental ministry, Spain would have among the highest concentrations in Europe, about the same as Sweden or Germany and only less than Britain, according to Aymerich.

This is good news for the estimated 500,000 golfers, mostly German, British and Scandinavian, who haul their clubs to Spain each year, said Peter Walton, chief executive of the International Association of Golf Tour Operators.

It may also be an invitation to American players. A growing number of golf resorts are trying to lure the California or Florida faithful with packages that combine putt practice with culture, like a side trip to Seville or a sherry winery, Mr. Walton said.

But environmentalists in Spain are bristling. They say a drought-prone country should not use its scarce water supply — even recycled water from nearby homes, which many developers say they use — to keep so many fairways green.

“In Málaga this summer, you couldn’t put water in a private swimming pool, and there were restrictions on tap water, but they continued to irrigate private courses,” said Guido Schmidt, in charge of water policy for the Spanish branch of the World Wildlife Fund.

He views the proliferation of manicured greens as a symptom of a deeper problem: a construction boom that has seen an average of 600,000 homes built a year since 2003, mostly in the parched south.

In fact, fairways often form the centerpieces of these Florida-style communities of vacation villas — aggressively marketed to aging baby boomers in London, Amsterdam or Berlin.

“The golf brochures always claim they are in protected areas with a beautiful landscape, but if it is protected land, shouldn’t it be used for activities compatible with nature?” Mr. Schmidt said.

The sand traps and bunkers are also sprouting at luxurious spa hotels, some of them linked to the new developments. Each seems determined to outdo the last.

Original Roman columns, and a few replicas, dot the 18-hole golf course at the Hotel Villa Padierna, a Tuscan-themed resort run by Ritz-Carlton, which opened in 2003 near yacht-lined Marbella. A Roman-style amphitheater overlooks some of the greens, just outside the spa.

The fairway at the Abama resort on Tenerife, which opened last year, was designed by Dave Thomas and climbs to about 1,000 feet above sea level. Each hole overlooks the ocean, said Fernando Sánchez, a golf sales executive. The sand for the traps was imported because the island’s natural sand is black.

In Benidorm, Spain’s quintessential package-tour playground on the Mediterranean, the Real de Faula Golf Resort and Spa, with both a Sheraton hotel and a Westin, mimics the look of a typical Mediterranean town. Its two 18-hole courses, designed by Jack Nicklaus, surround a jazz club, a restaurant complex and other candy-colored buildings designed to look like churches and cloisters.

Farther south in Murcia, a citrus and vegetable-growing region, the Spanish developer Polaris World is building an entire golf empire — with 35,000 vacation homes, three hotels run by the Inter-Continental chain and a “Nicklaus Golf Trail,” a series of nine courses designed by Jack Nicklaus or by his firm, Nicklaus Design, within a 15.5-mile radius — according to the deputy chief executive officer, Francisco Sardina. He hopes that this brand-name circuit will be enough to lure American golfers across the ocean.

Even the dusty central plains of La Mancha, fictional stomping grounds of Don Quixote, has caught the tee-off craze. By 2014, the city of Ciudad Real — rarely a stop on any tourist itinerary — will house a $3.85 billion resort, the Reino de Don Quijote de la Mancha. It will have two 18-hole golf courses, a 9-hole course, several themed hotels, a Japanese-style spa and a casino run by Harrah’s, according to a spokeswoman for the project, Emma Bolado.

But perhaps the most unusual putter’s oasis under way is Marina d’Or Golf, in the small Mediterranean town of Oropesa del Mar, north of Valencia. It will have two courses designed by Greg Norman; another by Sergio García of Spain; a ski slope; six themed hotels, including one built around an aquarium; and a plastic surgery clinic, said a sales representative, Cristina Sayans.

“It will be just like Las Vegas” she said.

Like many local politicians, Tomás Fabregat, a town councilman for Oropesa del Mar, says that extravaganzas like this generate jobs and sell homes.

“It allows thousands of families to have work all year round,” he said. The town has already quadrupled in population to 10,000 in less than a decade, he said.

Spanish tourism officials and hotel industry leaders also welcome these upscale resorts. They believe Spain can no longer compete with cheaper sun-and-surf destinations like Croatia and Morocco. The future, they say, is to forget sangría-guzzlers who shop for 10-euro flamenco dolls and to woo, instead, people willing to spend 60 to 200 euros a day ($78 to $262 at $1.31 to the euro) on a greens fee, or 2,000 euros ($2,565) for five days at a hotel with lessons from a pro.

But the environmental ministry is beginning to clamp down on building, and some Spaniards are beginning to join environmentalists in a backlash against encroaching fairways and cookie-cutter villas.

“It’s a total development disaster,” said Eva Brugarolas, a sales executive from the region of Murcia. “When I was a kid there were still virgin beaches, and now it’s all built up. The groves have become construction sites.”

Each week, it seems, the front page of national newspapers describes the latest investigation linked to the developments, often involving alleged political corruption in the awarding of permits to build on rural land. In some rural regions, outraged residents have begun to stage protests. Last month, a tiny Andalusian town, Cuevas del Becerro, went on strike in fear that a planned golfing community would usurp its water supply.

The mayor of the town, Isabel Teresa Rosado, said the upscale villas bring foreigners who drive prices up to British or Scandinavian levels. The rural way of life gives way as developers offer “out-of-orbit” prices for farmland and promises of hospitality jobs.

“It’s hard for people to resist,” she said.

In crowded coastal towns, however, many Spaniards say the resorts look positively outdoorsy compared with the Miami-skyline look that has been popular since the 1970s. They view the low-key golfers as deliverance from generations of rowdy spring-break-style vacationers.

“This is an oasis of peace, of repose,” said Pedro Carreño, a 66-year-old retiree, as he inspected the artificial beach, the meandering pool and a veranda overlooking the fairway at the Westin resort in Benidorm.

Almudena Bilbao, a sales clerk at a candle shop on the Benidorm beach, is not impressed.

“Here they’re building golf courses, and we don’t have a theater or a park for our kids,” she said.

But won’t the golfers bring more business?

“Those resort complexes have everything, so the people never leave,” she continued. “Someone who pays a fortune to stay there is never going to come to shop here.”