Javier Arana: Spain’s own course architect

Who he was

Javier de Arana e Ybarra, known as Javier Arana, was born in Bilbao on 5 January 1905. He was an amateur golfer, a sailor and, in time, a golf course designer. His father, a leading sportsman, brought him to sport young, and Javier started playing golf at ten on the 11-hole course of the Real Sociedad de Golf de Neguri, co-founded by his father in 1911.

He split his youth between golf and sailing and represented Spain in the 6-metre class at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympic Games, before gradually giving up sailing at the beginning of the 1930s.

The champion who became an architect

His first important golf victory came in 1926, when he won the first of five Vizcaya Championships. He won the Spanish International Amateur three times, in 1928, 1933 and 1934, and the French International Amateur in 1934. That year he also played The Open at Royal St George’s, though he did not qualify for the final rounds.

The Spanish Civil War halted his golfing career and steered him towards design. A proficient greenkeeper, he was chosen by the Royal Spanish Golf Federation to lead the reconstruction of courses devastated by the war. He started work in 1940 at Club de Campo.

His design ideas

The decisive meeting came with the arrival in Madrid in 1946 of the English architect Tom Simpson. The two formed a partnership, Simpson & Arana, and rebuilt courses across Spain. The first nine holes of Real Club de Golf Cerdaña, in Puigcerdà, were Arana’s first solo design.

Simpson taught him the strategic school of design: obstacles laid out to make a golfer think and not merely strike. Arana developed his own style from it: large greens turned on a diagonal to the line of play, few but strategically placed bunkers, and constant changes in the direction of holes. He adapted each routing to the available land, and his 17th hole was always a par 3.

On his own after Simpson left for England in 1948, he went on to design Reina Cristina in Algeciras (1951), El Prat (1955), the Black Course at Club de Campo (1956), Guadalmina Sur (1959), Neguri (1961), Río Real (1965), El Saler (1968), Ifach (1974) and Aloha (1975).

It is a small body of work: ten 18-hole courses in thirty years. Since 2013 there has been a book on it, The Golf Courses of Javier Arana, by Alfonso Erhardt Ybarra. Arana was also the main advocate for proper maintenance as a key element in the growth of golf, and the openings of El Prat and Club de Campo in the 1950s were a turning point for Spanish golf.

On ULTIMATE Golf

Río Real, in Marbella, was inaugurated in 1965. The club calls it one of the emblematic courses of the Costa del Sol and says it was designed by Javier Arana.

Aloha Golf Club, also in Marbella, was his last. He died in 1975, just as the course was being completed, and the inaugural drive was struck on 25 October 1975 by Ángel de la Riva, president of the Royal Andalusian Golf Federation. The club says Arana also designed El Saler in Valencia and El Prat in Barcelona; it was first run by Banco de Bilbao, and in 1978 it held the Spanish Amateur Championship.

Our advice: play Río Real and Aloha in the same trip and watch for the greens and the 17th, where the Arana signature is easiest to spot.