The Golden Palm is the most underrated course at Doral and the one most golfers discover on their second trip. Built in a links style unusual for South Florida, with wide-open sightlines, clean-edged bunkers, and contoured greens that rival the Blue Monster in difficulty, it plays differently from every other layout at the resort and earns its place in any serious Doral itinerary.
The History
The Golden Palm was renovated by Gil Hanse and his team as part of the Trump Organization’s $250 million property transformation, with Hanse taking the original course and reshaping it around a true links character. His approach drew on Australian course design principles rather than the American parkland or South Florida lakeland models: wide-open vistas, bunkers with tight-cut clean edges running along sprawling fairway lines, heavy rough behind the sand, and an overall look that feels closer to Sandbelt Melbourne than Miami.
The renovation was commissioned specifically to give the Golden Palm an identity distinct from the other three Doral courses rather than simply improving conditions. It succeeded. While the Blue Monster and Silver Fox are built around water and penalty, and the Red Tiger plays compact and accessible, the Golden Palm offers a third kind of test entirely, one where the primary challenge is reading the ground and managing the bunkers rather than carrying water or finding fairways cut narrow by rough.
The Golf
The Golden Palm plays to 7,012 yards as a par 71, with the heavily contoured greens that Hanse brought over from his Blue Monster renovation work running as the primary scoring challenge throughout the round. The greens will require a smooth putting stroke and a precise approach shot to the correct quadrant of the green on hole after hole. The links-style bunkers, low-profile with forward walls that catch the mis-hit but don’t swallow the ball entirely, demand clean technique to escape rather than raw power.
For a group spending three or more nights at Doral, the Golden Palm rounds out the trip with a genuinely different look at what the property offers, and it holds up well as a standalone round for any golfer who appreciates design variety as much as raw difficulty.
Want to play the Golden Palm at Doral? Coastal Golfaway has been packaging stay-and-play golf vacations since 1986. Reach out and we’ll put it together.