Solmar Golf Links in Cabo San Lucas has been voted Latin America’s Best Golf Course 2025, blending Greg Norman design with strong eco standards.
Solmar Golf Links in Cabo San Lucas has been voted Latin America’s Best Golf Course 2025 at the World Golf Awards, pushing Mexico firmly to the top of the region’s golf conversation. The recognition lands at a moment when Los Cabos is breaking visitor records and competing with destinations across the Caribbean and South America for high-spend sports travelers.
The awards program, part of the broader World Travel Awards family, selects its winners through an online vote that runs for months and is open to golf travel professionals, media and everyday golfers. In the 2025 edition, Solmar Golf Links was named Latin America’s Best Golf Course, while Mexico also took the title of Latin America’s Best Golf Destination, signaling how central the sport has become to the country’s tourism strategy.
Los Cabos already promotes itself as a year-round golf haven, with around 18 courses in play and several more on the way along the corridor between Cabo San Lucas and San José del Cabo. Adding a continental award to that mix gives the destination a new flagship to market, one that sits on a bluff of dunes above the Pacific Ocean.
Solmar Golf Links
Solmar Golf Links opened in 2020 on the Pacific side of Cabo San Lucas as a Greg Norman signature design anchoring an 800-plus-acre resort and residential community roughly 15 minutes from downtown. The par-72 course stretches more than 7,200 yards and traces a low-profile path through three distinct ecosystems: massive coastal dunes, a desert interior dotted with cardón cacti and arroyos, and a littoral zone that edges the beach.
One of the course’s calling cards is that every hole offers a view of the Pacific. Several fairways run so close to the shoreline that, in winter, golfers can sometimes spot migrating whales offshore while they play. The design leans into a “least disturbance” philosophy, working with the natural contours rather than against them, thereby keeping many native desert areas and non-irrigated dunes intact.
The layout is also known for revetted pot bunkers, a visual signature more often associated with traditional British links. At Solmar, the steep bunker walls are built from recycled artificial turf, giving the hazards sharp edges while reusing materials that would otherwise become waste. Tees, fairways and greens are grassed with SeaDwarf paspalum, a salt-tolerant variety that performs well with brackish water and requires fewer chemical inputs than many conventional grasses.
The most photographed moment on the course comes at the par-3 17th, an island green suspended between sea and sand that has quickly become one of the most recognizable shots in Cabo. Together, these features help explain why the course rose so fast, in just a few seasons, from new arrival to regional standard-bearer.
Beyond its design, Solmar Golf Links has built much of its reputation around environmental management. In 2021, it became the first course in Los Cabos to earn designation as a Certified Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary, a status that was renewed in 2024. The certification requires documented work in areas such as wildlife habitat, water conservation, chemical use reduction and community education. At Solmar, that has included preserving large areas of native desert vegetation, shrinking irrigated turf where possible and monitoring water quality in lakes and ponds on the property.
Golf tourism and sustainability in Los Cabos
The award also lands in a region where golf is both an economic engine and a flashpoint. Tourism has driven Los Cabos to repeated records at its international airport, with more than 3.5 million passengers arriving in the first five months of 2025 alone. Local officials and business leaders often highlight the destination’s championship golf courses as part of the appeal for high-spend travelers, especially those booking stay-and-play packages at luxury resorts.
At the same time, the rapid build-out of courses—18 operating now and several more in development—has intensified questions about how much water a desert resort town can spare for fairways and greens. Investigations into local water access have described stark contrasts between the constant supply enjoyed by hotels and the intermittent service in some working-class neighborhoods. In that context, a course that pursues third-party environmental certifications and invests in water-efficient turf and irrigation practices stands out, but it does not remove the need for broader regional planning.
Solmar Golf Links sits squarely in this tension. Its operators point to the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary status as evidence that championship-level golf can be run with tighter controls on water, chemicals and habitat disruption. Environmental advocates, meanwhile, argue that even the most efficient course must still reckon with the cumulative demand created by nearly two dozen layouts in a single, fast-growing municipality.
For Mexico, the World Golf Awards recognition is a useful marketing tool as the country positions itself as Latin America’s leading golf destination. Nationally, golf tourism brings in visitors who stay longer, spend more per trip and often return to the same resort communities year after year. For Los Cabos, the challenge is to convert that spending into lasting benefits for the local population while managing scarce natural resources.
Solmar Golf Links now carries a trophy that every course in the region would love to display. Whether it becomes a model for how Mexican golf can grow in a hotter, drier future will depend less on the plaques in its clubhouse and more on the daily choices made on its fairways, in its maintenance sheds and in the public debates that surround it. What is clear, after this year’s awards, is that the conversation about where and how golf fits into Los Cabos’ future will increasingly start on this stretch of Pacific coastline.
