There are a wealth of great golf course options in the Naples area, which many consider the “Palm Springs of Florida golf” and residents proudly claim as the “Golf Capital of the Sunshine State.”
The undisputed bell cow of the region is the Tiburon Golf Club, a facility good enough to annually host both the LPGA’s season-ending CME Group Championship in November and the Grant Thornton Invitational, the most inclusive tournament in professional golf in offering equal prize money and visibility to its field of PGA TOUR and LPGA stars when played in December.
Tiburon Golf Club’s two courses, the Gold and the Black, were both designed by Greg Norman and opened in 1998 and 2001, respectively. The golf facility is an amenity of the opulent Ritz-Carlton, Naples and is located about four miles inland from the main resort and the Gulf of Mexico.
Its off-the-water setting likely kept the courses from being wrecked when Hurricane Ian came ashore just 42 miles to the north in late September with 150 mph winds. The courses received little damage outside of the uprooting of some 400 trees and rain-created flooding…