Golf du Château de Raray

Few golf courses can claim a setting quite like this one. The Château de Raray — a 17th-century hunting estate in the Oise department of Picardy — became internationally famous long before any golf club was formed here, as the location where Jean Cocteau filmed his 1946 surrealist masterpiece "La Belle et la Bête." The iconic stone arcade of hunting sphinxes that flanks the château's forecourt appears in the film's opening sequence, and it remains standing today, lending the course an atmosphere that is genuinely unlike anything else in French golf.

The course itself sits within the wooded parkland of the estate, roughly 50 kilometers north of Paris and close to the forest of Compiègne — a landscape of mature trees, open meadows, and the quiet Picard countryside. The region has a long association with aristocratic leisure, and the château setting reinforces that sense of history at every turn.

For visiting golfers, the experience is as much about the place as the golf itself — a chance to play inside a working piece of French cultural and architectural heritage that most visitors to France never get to see up close.