Golf Club Puerto Madryn

Puerto Madryn sits on the edge of the Patagonian steppe, where the Atlantic coast of Chubut province is better known for whale watching and Magellanic penguins than for golf. The town itself is the gateway to Península Valdés, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the landscape that surrounds the course is stark and magnificent in the way only Patagonia can be — wide open skies, scrubby low vegetation, and a persistent wind off the South Atlantic that is essentially a permanent playing condition rather than an occasional nuisance.

Golf Club Puerto Madryn is a community club serving a relatively small but loyal membership in one of Argentina's most remote coastal cities. Courses of this type in Patagonia tend to be straightforward in design, shaped more by the land's natural contours and the available budget than by architectural ambition, but what they lack in manicured drama they make up for in raw, elemental character. Wind management is not a skill you practice here — it is the entire game.

For traveling golfers, playing here is less about the course itself and more about the context: golf at the edge of the world, surrounded by one of the planet's great wildlife landscapes. The experience belongs to the category of places you play because of where they are, and that is more than enough reason.