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Camiral: The Course Booked for Golf’s Next Ryder Cup

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Catalonia’s two championship layouts, six years before the crowds arrive.

Camiral, in the Girona countryside an hour north of Barcelona, has just been named host of the 2031 Ryder Cup. It is only the second Spanish venue in the competition’s history, following Valderrama in 1997, and the decision changes what a round here means. The two championship courses have always been serious golf. Now they come with a deadline attached.

Golfer checking in a golf travel bag at airport departures before a golf holiday

A Second Ryder Cup for Spain

Ryder Cup Europe’s selection of Camiral makes Spain the first country on the continent to host the event twice, a decision framed by chief executive Guy Kinnings as recognition of Spanish golf’s long-standing contribution to the competition. Sergio García remains the Ryder Cup’s all-time points leader, and Jon Rahm has been one of Europe’s defining players across the last three editions. Camiral now carries that history forward. (ESPN)

Stadium and Tour — Two Different Tests

Camiral operates two courses, and they reward different games. The Camiral Stadium is the tougher of the pair, having hosted a DP World Tour event three times, most recently in 2022, and the European Tour’s Qualifying School Final Stage on seven occasions since 2008.

Camiral Stadium course fairway with the Girona countryside behind, Costa Brava
Next door, the Camiral Tour was built to the same standard but wider, with larger greens that give a broader range of handicaps a fair shot at scoring well. Both share ground that was originally earmarked for a Grand Prix circuit before Formula 1 relocated to Montmeló — golf got the better draw. Between now and 2031, the resort will also host the Estrella Damm Catalunya Championship each year from 2028 to 2030, so the countdown is already on the calendar. (ESPN)

Camiral Tour course, the kinder option

Girona and the Costa Brava Table

The resort itself, now trading as Camiral after years as PGA Catalunya, sits a five-minute transfer from Girona airport. Girona itself is worth the detour on a rest day — a walled old town of stone stairways and a cathedral that climbs straight up from the Onyar river, with a market culture built on Catalan cooking rather than tourist menus. Barcelona is an hour away if the trip stretches to a long weekend either side of the golf. (The Independent)

Historic Old tow Girona

Play It Before 2031

Ryder Cup venues rarely get quieter as the event approaches. Valderrama’s profile only grew after 1997, and Camiral will follow the same curve — more attention, fuller tee sheets, and eventually a course that plays host to the loudest week in golf. Six years is not a long runway. The Stadium and Tour courses are booking-ready now, at a stage where a serious golfer can play the same fairways the world’s best will contest without the surrounding circus.

Camiral joins a shortlist of courses that will only get harder to book quietly. Browse Costa Brava golf holidays and get there ahead of 2031.

Monte Rei Rebuilt: The Algarve’s Number One Returns on 14 September

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Five months closed. Every green rebuilt. What comes back is not quite the course that shut in April.

The Monte Rei North Golf Course, the eastern Algarve’s flagship, has been off the map since 13 April. It reopens on 14 September. Five months is a long absence for a top ranked Jack Nicklaus Signature design, and the work carried out in that window, goes considerably beyond seasonal maintenance.

Monte Rei main resort

What Actually Changed

This was not a cosmetic tidy-up. The greens have been reconstructed, along with their collars and surrounds. Bunkers have been renovated. Cart paths and access roads have been refurbished. That list covers the surfaces a golfer interacts with on every hole of the round, which is why the closure ran to five months rather than five weeks.

Monte Rei main resort

The Work You Will Not See

Monte Rei framed the project carefully when it announced the closure in February, describing improvements designed to enhance the course while “remaining true to the character, values and playing experience envisioned by Jack Nicklaus.” The intention is restoration of quality, not redesign. Golfers returning in September should expect the same course, playing better.

The more consequential part of the project sits underground. The irrigation system and pumping station have both been modernised, and water efficiency was named as a central focus of the intervention from the outset.

The timing is not accidental. Algarve golf courses collectively use around 15 cubic hectometres of water a year, and the region has spent the past eighteen months building the infrastructure to supply a growing share of that from treated reused water rather than boreholes and dams. A five-month closure is the only realistic opportunity a course of this standing gets to rebuild its irrigation from the ground up. Monte Rei took it.

Eighteen Signature Holes

The North Course opened in 2007 and remains the only Jack Nicklaus Signature course in Portugal. It runs to 7,181 yards from the tournament tees, plays to a par of 72, and brings water into play on eleven holes. The setting does much of the work — the foothills of the Serra do Caldeirão behind, the Atlantic visible to the south, cork oak and pine throughout.

Monte Rei course map

Nicklaus himself visited in 2019 and put the design philosophy more plainly than any brochure has managed since: “You didn’t hire me to design a signature hole, you wanted me to design 18 signature holes, and that’s what we tried to do.”

Reopening Into the Best Month of the Year

September is a shrewd date to come back. October is the single busiest month for golf in the Algarve — 179,000 rounds played across the region, ahead of April on 162,000 and March on 153,000, from a record annual total of 1.46 million. The North Course reopens with a fortnight to settle before that window opens.

Dining to match the elite golfing experience

The rest of the resort never closed. The villas, the spa, the pool and the restaurants have operated throughout, including Vistas Rui Silvestre, which first took a Michelin star in 2019. Guests who booked Monte Rei this summer for everything except the golf have not been short of reasons to stay.

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Autumn in the eastern Algarve is quieter than the Golden Triangle, warmer than most people expect, and — from mid-September — back to full strength. Browse our Algarve golf holidays and see what the eastern end of the coast is holding.


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Portugal’s Golf Course Rankings Shake Up

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The “King” has been toppled after 15 years. A new course is at the top.

Top100GolfCourses.com has published its 2026 update to Portugal’s Top 50, and it is being called the most volatile edition in the list’s history, with only four courses holding on to their previous position. That is a lot of movement for a country with around eighty-six eighteen-hole courses spread across five regions.

For anyone planning a golf trip to Portugal this year, it is also useful reading: a top spot is not permanent, and neither is a top-ten place secure. At the summit, a course that only opened in 2023 has done something no course outside the Algarve has managed since 2008: taken the national number one spot. (Top100GolfCourses.com)

A New Name at the Top

Fairway through dune land at Dunas Terras da Comporta golf course near Lisbon

Dunas Terras da Comporta, an hour south of Lisbon on the edge of the Sado Estuary, now sits at number one in Portugal. Designed by David McLay Kidd through natural dune land, it has collected a run of international honours since opening in 2023, and this latest placing confirms it as more than a passing trend. It is the first time since 2008 that a course from the Lisbon & Central region has led the national ranking. Five minutes away, the Torre course, designed by Sergio García, gives the estate a second layout worth building a trip around. Play Dunas Terras da Comporta and the case for both makes itself.

Monte Rei Steps Aside

Monte Rei North golf course in the Eastern Algarve

For fifteen years, Monte Rei North held the number one position in Portugal without serious challenge. That run ends this year. The Jack Nicklaus Signature design near Tavira in the eastern Algarve now sits at number two, still firmly inside the country’s elite, still one of the more complete tests of golf on the Iberian Peninsula. Set among cork oak and pine, the course rewards accuracy over power, and its practice facilities are as complete as its ranking suggests. Fifteen years at the top is not a run many courses anywhere in the world can claim, and second place on a list this competitive is no demotion. It is simply Portuguese golf catching up with itself.

Quinta do Lago South Returns to the Podium

Monte Rei North golf course in the Eastern Algarve

Quinta do Lago South climbed three places to number three, reclaiming a podium finish and reasserting its position as the Algarve’s leading traditional resort course. Set within the Ria Formosa Natural Park, it pairs golf with one of the region’s more distinctive landscapes, saltwater marshland giving way to fairways rather than the other way around. The course has long been the benchmark against which newer Algarve designs are measured, and this year’s ranking makes that case with numbers rather than reputation alone.

Rankings shift from year to year, this year more than most, with six courses entering the Top 25 for the first time. What doesn’t shift is why golfers keep returning to Portugal: more than three hundred days of sunshine in the Algarve, a growing case for Lisbon & Central, and courses across both regions built for a repeat visit, not a single tick on a list. Browse our Algarve golf holidays and see the courses behind the numbers.


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