Mexican architect José Agustin Pizá explains how he, along with colleagues in the international golf industry, is trying to help bring the game to a new audience in South America

Frank Sinatra may have sung about floating down to Peru in ‘Come Fly With Me’, but, keen golfer though he was, he probably wouldn’t have picked up a game when he got there. Even today, golf is a minority sport in the South American country, played largely by the elite. But in a couple of years, I hope a project I have been involved with will at least start to change that.

Peru has no proper public golf courses at the moment. About the only public golfing facility is a sand-based nine hole course on a flat, 24 hectare piece of land outside Lima, donated to the local golf federation by the IPD, the Peruvian Institute of Sport. Here, local kids can learn the game and its etiquette, albeit on browns instead of greens. Uniquely, I think, the site is shared with a runway that is used for flying ultralight aircraft! A bell rings when a plane is about to take off or land, and golf stops until the way is clear.

The aim of our project is to convert the sand course into a fully fledged nine hole grass course, with driving range. Some funding is being provided from government sources, while the Peruvian Golf Association is also fundraising from the private sector. The total project value will be in the region of US$1-1.5 million, a figure unusually low, because many of the consultants involved (including us and irrigation designer Paul Granger) are providing their services pro bono.

Reducing the grass footprint is a key goal, and the plan, as well as Paul’s irrigation design, has been put together with this firmly in mind. Lima generally, but this area in particular, is arid – it rarely rains, and there is next to no vegetation on the surrounding hillsides. This will be a municipal course for locals to learn the game, so there’s no scope for wasting money. For the course to be sustainable, it has to operate on a low budget.

That said, the dry environment will work to our advantage. Our goal is to shape the whole course this year. It won’t take more than two months to dig the irrigation lake and use that material to shape the golf holes. The funding to complete the course is not yet in place, but that doesn’t matter right now. In most parts of the world, if you completed shaping and then left the site for some time, you’d have unwanted vegetation grow, which you would have to kill off before going back to grass the holes. Here, that isn’t the case, so we can wait till next year to place the irrigation and install the drainage. Meanwhile, the kids will still play on the same browns, but it’ll be their first experience on proper shaping.

Paul’s irrigation design has also been created with sustainability in mind. Labour is cheap in Peru – and in any case job creation is an important goal for the scheme – so much less of the irrigation will be automatic than would normally be the case. As for the course itself, it will be divided into three sections of three holes, of increasing difficulty. If you have a kid who’s learning, and he can’t yet master the first three holes, you know he’s not ready to move on to the second three. Holes seven and nine are going to be part of the driving range. That may sound odd at first, but again, it’s all part of trying to focus on sustainability. Driving ranges are packed early in the morning, but then there’s no-one there till the evening, and on a site where every square metre of grass is vital, we need to make the space work hard for us.

Which brings us back to the planes! The ultralights will continue to operate from the property even once the golf course is complete, but we’re confident it won’t cause too much of a problem. It’s not as though this is an international airport – they have a window of between two and four months each year when they fly, and maybe one takes off or lands each hour. We can live with it, and it’s certainly something that will make the course unique. Normally when golfers hear a bell, they know it’s safe to play. Here, it’ll be the other way round!

José Agustin Pizá is a golf architect based in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

This article first appeared in Golf Course Architecture Issue 33.