East Golf Course

Few addresses in Caribbean golf carry more weight than Dorado Beach, where Laurance Rockefeller's legendary resort gave birth to a complex of courses that shaped the region's golfing identity. The East Course — 1 of the original Robert Trent Jones Sr. layouts opened in the early 1960s — belongs to that storied lineage. Jones sculpted the routing through coconut palm groves and along the Puerto Rican coastline, blending tropical lushness with the strategic demands he was perfecting on a global scale at the time. The East long held a reputation as the more demanding of the Dorado Beach siblings, a target-golf test where accuracy matters as much as power.

The resort fell into dormancy for years before Ritz-Carlton revived the property, and the East Course was restored to something close to its original Jones character — a rarity in an era when renovation often means reinvention.

Dorado itself sits on Puerto Rico's northern coast, roughly 30 miles west of San Juan, where trade winds off the Atlantic keep conditions honest and the scenery makes a bogey easier to absorb.