Building the next course at a property after one has been hugely acclaimed is a double-edged sword.
On the one hand, following on from success means that the developer is likely to be in a positive frame of mind, and it’s probable that at least some of the characteristics of the successful course could apply to yours too. It’s likely that a follow-up course after a really good one will get a lot of attention, and it’s inevitable that what you do will be compared to what has gone before. If you do a really great job, that might work to your advantage: the acclaim that Bandon Dunes received didn’t stop the subsequent Pacific Dunes being even more highly rated. But it is equally possible that the first course was the best that could be produced in that location, and any subsequent work will be unfavourably compared to it.
When David McLay Kidd’s Dunas course at the Terras da Comporta resort finally opened (the story of its protracted birth is told in the July 2023 issue of GCA) it was praised to the skies. It has been regarded by pretty much everyone as the best course in Portugal. So whoever was hired to build the resort’s second course, known as Torre (pronounced with a richly rolling R and a basically silent final vowel) had a big target to aim at.
Like Dunas, the Torre project has been around for a long time. I first came across it around 15 years ago, when Portugal was bidding for the Ryder Cup that was eventually awarded to France and played at Le Golf National. The Torre site, which at the time was owned by Banco Espiritu Santu, the country’s largest bank, was proposed as the location for the Cup, and the American architect Tom Fazio hired to design a course.
That, of course, came to nothing, though as it happened, Fazio would eventually design a course just down the road, at the CostaTerra development by American firm Discovery Land. Torre sat undeveloped, until the entire Comporta project was acquired by Portuguese firm Vanguard Properties. Vanguard contracted with Kidd (and contractor Conor Walsh, Kidd’s shaper on the original build) to finish the Dunas course, and once that opened to great acclaim, turned its attention back to Torre.
The Torre course has been built on a sandy site to the north of the club's Dunas layout (Photo: James Hogg)
Torre is not, it should be said, as dramatic a property as that occupied by Dunas. But that should not be taken as saying it is bland, for it is not. It is a site that any golf architect would give something very precious – left arm, first born child, dog – to work on. Like the whole of the Troia peninsula, it is pure sand, and it has beautiful contour, never flat but rarely too extreme for golf.
Developer Vanguard resolved to take a rather different tack from the Dunas course at Torre, hiring Sergio Garcia as signature designer, and NCM Network, the firm whose main design brand is in the name of José María Olazábal, to do the actual work. NCM is now a substantial operation, with five architects and a lot of projects in a wide range of locations; Icelandic architect Snorri Vihljalmsson was the point man here at Torre.
Signature designers rarely play that active a role in the actual architecture of a course, but here Garcia had one key influence: in homage to his favourite course, Valderrama, he said that he felt the course should have greens that were significantly smaller than the (admittedly enormous) ones on Dunas. We should not go overboard here: Torre is not Pebble Beach. The greens average just under 500 square metres (5,000 square feet), on the petite side by modern standards, but hardly miniscule, although the green on the short par-four twelfth, one of the course’s standouts, is really quite small. As befits a smaller set, they are generally rather subtly contoured, though the eighth hole, one of my favourites on the course, has a green that falls away rather sharply in its back segment.
Torre is actually quite a subtle course all round. In stark contrast to the Fazio plan, which included an enormous earth move, the total was just over 200,000 cubic metres.
At the request of Sergio Garcia, Torre’s greens are smaller than those on the Dunas (Photo: James Hogg)
Other standout holes include two of the par fives, the ninth, which plays from a significantly elevated tee, and asks the golfer to avoid a single pine tree in the middle of the landing zone, and the uphill eleventh, at which the player can drive safely left, guaranteeing it will be a three-shot hole, or take on the carry of a large sandy waste to the right, giving the opportunity to get home in two.
Torre is, obviously, very new – at the time of my visit, the course was not even in its soft opening phase – and the scars of construction are very visible on the land. This led me to what, at first, was my main criticism of the course, that the waste sand areas were extremely stark and visually distracting. I thought initially that it was excessive complexity in the edge of the waste areas that bothered me – and certainly the waste on the home hole, where I first formulated the thought – is extremely curvy. I don’t necessarily take the view that waste areas must have very straight, Dye-like lines, but in general when obviously artificial features dominate the visual space, it bothers me.
However, on a second trip round the course, I realised that was not the issue, and a subsequent conversation with Vihljalmsson confirmed it. The fact that the corridors were cleared of trees in preparation for the Fazio course, and that the actual build had slightly different lines means that the edges of the holes generally go from fairway, to waste sand, to scrubby vegetation and finally to the pine trees. It’s this transition that bothered me, and it will be possible to fix it over time as the greens crew gently clears vegetation – and more grows – to blur the lines between open sand and native scrub.
The course, like Dunas, was built by Walsh and his CJW Golf International team, and it bears the hallmarks of their consistently fine work. Unlike Dunas, which architect Kidd chose to grass with fescue, reasoning that, despite the climate, it was essentially a links site, Torre has more conventional turf choices for the region: Tahoma 31 bermuda on tees and fairways, and Pure Select creeping bentgrass on the putting surfaces. Vihljalmsson tells me that the resort intends not to overseed the bermuda in the winter when it goes dormant, but to use a product to reduce the impact of dormancy. In any case, the cool season/warm season grass mix at the two Comporta courses should mean that one of the two courses is in prime condition at any part of the year.
The course is now open for play and helps to make Comporta an extremely compelling destination (Photo: James Hogg)
The course has had a Toro Lynx Smart Module (LSM) control system with Infinity sprinklers installed, with Toro working with distributor Irrimac from Portgual on the install.
Comporta is an extremely compelling destination. It is only an hour or so from Lisbon airport, it has excellent golf, and the rest of its tourist offering – the beach, the weather, the food, the hotels – is out of the top drawer. Developer Vanguard and the other golf courses in the region need to come together to develop a cooperative marketing programme for the whole of the Troia peninsula: it has the potential to be regarded as one of Europe’s elite golf destinations. The addition of Torre only goes to make the offer stronger. It might not be able to dethrone its sister Dunas for the title of Portugal’s best course, but it is a very good partner and a very good piece of work.