Banyan Golf Course

Hawaii's Big Island carries more than one personality, and Hilo — the rainy, lush, unhurried eastern side — offers a very different backdrop for golf than the sun-baked resort corridors of the Kohala Coast. Hilo is a working town, rooted in Hawaiian culture and agriculture, draped in the kind of relentless green that only 130 inches of annual rainfall can produce. Golf here tends to feel local and unpretentious, a world away from the manicured destination courses an hour up the road.

Banyan Golf Course takes its name from the iconic banyan trees that appear throughout the islands — massive, cathedral-canopied trees that spread their aerial roots into something closer to a grove than a single trunk. If they are present on the property, as the name implies, they lend the course an immediate sense of place and scale that no amount of landscaping can manufacture.

A municipal-style layout in an agricultural town surrounded by rainforest, Banyan likely plays as a community course — accessible, affordable, and steeped in the kind of everyday local golf culture that keeps the game honest.