The Breakers: Florida’s oldest golf course, laid out in 1897

Flagler’s oceanfront resort

In the late 1890s, just before the turn of the century, industrial tycoons and elegant socialites began flocking to a new destination, a long strip of an island called Palm Beach. It was Henry M. Flagler, one of America’s great industrialists, who started the trend of grand properties there. His first was The Royal Poinciana, a six-story Georgian hotel.

Two years later Flagler debuted his premier oceanfront hotel, right at “the breakers”, where the waves crashed and sprayed. The resort says it was founded in 1896.

Fires and rebirth

After fires in 1903 and 1925 the hotel reemerged more opulent each time. The second reconstruction, reopened in 1926, was modelled after the Villa Medici in Rome and called for 75 artisans brought in from Italy.

The reconstruction went to New York City designers who would later create Manhattan hotels including the Pierre and the Sherry-Netherland. They described the new Breakers as “the acme of perfection in design and magnificence”.

They completed the intricate paintings that cover the ceilings of the 200-foot-long main lobby and first-floor public rooms, which remain on display today. The guest register read like a who’s who of early twentieth-century America, from the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts to Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan.

Year by year the reputation grew, and word spread, beckoning the glitterati to vacation in Palm Beach year-round. Today the resort employs more than 2,500 people.

The Ocean Course

Golf arrived early. The Ocean Course, which the resort describes as Florida’s oldest golf course and has nurtured for more than a century, inherits the original layout designed by Alexander H. Findlay in 1897.

In late 2018 it emerged from a full-scale renovation by the architect Rees Jones, who balanced preservation and modernisation with new salt-tolerant grass and fresh water features. “Every hole has a different little twist and different set of details,” Jones says. The course now has 56 sand- and grass-faced bunkers and six lakes, and glimpses of the Atlantic appear between the holes.

The Ocean Course has TifEagle Bermuda greens, a 6,500-square-foot putting green and an 18,000-square-foot practice green, and holes that bend both left to right and right to left. It is a course for players of all levels.

A second course

Ten miles from the resort lies the Rees Jones Course, a championship layout of blue ponds, pines, oaks and other native landscaping. It was originally built in 1968, reimagined by its namesake architect in 2004, and again in 2022. The resort describes it as a modern complement to the more traditional Ocean Course, with gentle contours and expanded shot options on most holes.

Both courses are private, reserved for resort guests and club members only, and the John Webster Golf Academy, led by the PGA Class-A professional John Webster, teaches at both of them. At the Ocean Course its teaching bay sits on the driving range of the historic course, with digital video and swing analysis.

At the Rees Jones Course the academy’s learning centre sits on a double-sided driving range, with two 480-square-foot hitting bays equipped with four digital cameras for a 360-degree view of your swing.

Our advice: if you are staying at The Breakers, ask about a round on the Ocean Course, and allow time to look up at the painted ceilings of the lobby before you head out to the first tee.