Teeth of the Dog is the best golf course in the Caribbean and one of the great seaside courses on earth. That’s not a marketing line. It’s a verdict that Golf Magazine, Golf Digest, and generations of golfers who’ve made the trip to La Romana have all landed on independently, and the course has only gotten better since reopening in December 2025 after its first comprehensive renovation in over fifty years.
The History
In 1969, Pete Dye was hired to build a golf course on the southeastern coastline of the Dominican Republic for a resort that would become Casa de Campo. He arrived to find thousands of acres of coral rock, Caribbean coastline, and a large crew of Dominican laborers working without heavy machinery, breaking apart the sharp coral by hand with sledgehammers, pickaxes, and chisels. The coral cut the workers’ hands, feet, and arms. They started calling it “diente del perro,” teeth of the dog, and the name stuck.
Dye opened the course in 1971. He later said the opportunity to carve it from that coastline was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and that he only really built eleven holes: “The other seven were designed by God.” Those seven holes, the ones running directly along the rocky shore of the Caribbean Sea, are what have made Teeth of the Dog famous. Dye loved the course and the place so much that he built a home alongside the 7th fairway and lived there for decades. When he passed in 2020, his ashes were interred near the 8th green.
The course closed in January 2025 for its most extensive renovation since opening, led by former PGA Tour player Jerry Pate and design partner Steve Dana. Pate’s connection to the course goes back to 1974, when he led the American team to victory at the World Amateur Team Championship here and struck up a friendship with Dye that lasted until Dye’s death. The restoration work was careful and deliberate: all bunkers were rebuilt to restore the flat sand floors Dye originally intended, putting green space lost to decades of shrinkage was recaptured, and drainage and turf infrastructure were overhauled throughout. Pate and Dana preserved what makes the course feel like itself, including the settled-in micro-contours and character that only come from fifty years of history. Teeth of the Dog reopened on December 7, 2025, almost exactly 54 years after it first opened.
The Golf
The routing is a clockwise front nine and counterclockwise back nine, with seven holes sitting no more than twenty feet above the surf. The sea runs left on holes five through eight and right on fifteen through seventeen, and together they constitute what regulars at Casa de Campo have long called the Heaven Seven. Three of those seven are par-3s, and all three rank among the most memorable short holes in golf. The par-3 5th, a short but unforgiving hole with zero margin for error on the ocean side, is a particular standout. Dye himself considered it one of the best holes he ever built.
The eleven inland holes aren’t filler. They feature the same Dye fingerprints found at TPC Sawgrass, Whistling Straits, and Kiawah Island: strategic bunkering, mounding that forces decisions, and greens that protect themselves without relying on length. The course plays to a par of 72 from a maximum of 7,253 yards, with a course rating of 76.0, and the trade winds that blow in off the Caribbean add a layer of difficulty no scorecard can fully capture.
Access requires a resort stay at Casa de Campo. Tee times are reserved exclusively for registered guests, villa owners, and their accompanying groups, which makes tying the round to a properly booked package the most reliable way to guarantee the round you came for.
Want to build a Dominican Republic golf trip around Teeth of the Dog? Coastal Golfaway has been packaging stay-and-play golf vacations since 1986. Reach out and we’ll put it together.
