After 50 years the moment had arrived to carry out a major renovation of one of Spain’s most venerable golf courses, Royal Sotogrande. Designed by the legendary and prolific architect Robert Trent Jones, the club’s magnificent 18 holes were inaugurated in 1964.
The golf course revamp is planned in two phases. The first, undertaken on eight holes, began on 8 January and finished on 31 July. The second will affect nine holes, and work is scheduled to start on 15 October and end in July 2016. The remaining hole, the 13th, was renovated in 2013 and served as a showcase of what was planned for the rest of the course.
“With that hole we proved to ourselves that we could complete the work as scheduled, of a high quality and within the budget,” says club general manager Agustín Mazarrasa.
During the first phase, the 1st, 2nd, 8th, 9th, 10th, 16th, 17th and 18th holes were renovated. This selection included non-consecutive holes for a particular reason. “We had to combine holes with a natural sand foundation, which was pure sand, such as the 1st, 2nd, 16th, 17th and 18th, with holes with a lot of clay soil, like the 8th, 9th and 10th, which needed sand provided from tee to green, from slope to slope, to a depth of 20 centimetres.
“To give you an idea,” continues Mazarrasa, “just for these three we had to provide an average of 25 trailers for each hole, 18,000 tonnes of sand. We had to mix difficult holes with others less complicated. The 8th, 9th and 10th required drainage from tee to green then later sand. In those that had sand, such as the 1st and 2nd, we basically worked on the drainage and didn’t have to provide sand.”
The golf course design has only been tweaked on the 8th, which has been shortened slightly because the shot to the green was completely blind. “We lowered it a bit and now the hole is slightly more accessible for most members, and everyone is really happy.”
The renovation was initiated, after half a century, because the course was suffering the customary ailments for its age, notes Mazarrasa. “We would re-seed in September-October with raygrass, which is a seed for cold climates, in order to have the course in good condition during winter and spring, but when the heat arrived the raygrass died and weeds started to spring up, contaminating the whole course. As we always used to say, there were a lot of very well cut weeds. But what happened was that at the end of August and start of September the course was completely laid to waste, contaminated, with loads of dry areas, so we had to find a solution no matter what, because that is also very costly to maintain.”
The most important work involved providing the course with an infrastructure that it had lacked, especially drainage and also sand on all the holes that didn’t already have enough. This means that, when the second phase is completed, all the holes on the course will have a uniform layer of sand, which is key to maintaining the Bermuda’s high quality.
In addition, all the renovated holes have been re-turfed, “an arduous task”, over a total area of 17 hectares, which will increase to 37 hectares when the second phase is completed. So the whole course will be uniform with Bermuda, while the greens will still have Agrosti.
Another job involved levelling the tees using laser technology, and all the bunkers on the eight holes have been re-shaped. “We’ve made a lot of improvements,” says Mazarrasa. “From the tee often you couldn’t see the bunkers, and now you can, which is very important from a tactical point of view. The re-shaping work was significant, because it was a fairly flat course and the shaper has given it a form that improves it a lot aesthetically. The area comprising the 1st, 2nd, 16th, 17th and 18th holes has a depth that previously it didn’t have, the level of the lake has been raised… it’s been an excellent job. Aesthetically the course has also improved greatly.”
The work was supervised directly by the club, with the help of Roger Rulewich, who was a disciple of Robert Trent Jones’s for 35 years, and his partner David Fleury, who is in charge of driving the bulldozer and shaping the course. “They have really done a fantastic job.”
According to Mazarrasa, “The objective was also to restore the original greens, and we’ve achieved that. We had Robert Trent Jones’ original blueprints, sketches and outlines that he did by hand, as well as the as-built blueprints. Using these plans as a base, we have restored the original designs. The greens had lost some of their surface, and in some cases their flair. For example, the 1st had water right up to the green, and when the water level declined it didn’t come into play.”
Mazarrasa says the main guiding premise behind the renovation project was to respect the original Robert Trent Jones design while introducing improvements that the course required.
