The Links at Spanish Bay

In the early 1980s, Robert Trent Jones Jr. was called to a project, Spanish Bay, in Del Monte Forest, California, in the United States of America. Tom Watson and Sandy Tatum, both fans of British golf, were invited to team up with him. And so, the designers began to draw up the development that would include The Inn at Spanish Bay. In 1985, the plans received the last necessary approval and the company began the new and large project, which opened on November 05, 1987. 
In the opening round, Tom Watson shot 67 holes. As he walked off the course, he uttered the words that went down in history: «It’s so much like Scotland, you can almost hear the bagpipes playing.» And that’s how, unintentionally, an unusual tradition came into being. Every day, just before sunset, a piper lets out the unmistakable nostalgic sound of the bagpipes. This is how you know that the course has closed its doors. 
Developing over expansive sand dunes, The Links at Spanish Bay reveals some of the most spectacular views of the Pebble Beach coastline. Undulating fairways flow through and around the dune landscape, snaking between towering Monterey pines, before returning to the white sand of Spanish Bay Beach for a thrilling finish along the windswept coastline. 

In former times, this area was known for its sand mining. Today, The Links at Spanish Bay, built on vast sandy terrain, is the ideal course for the true links-style game. And there was an environmental concern with it from the start. The dunes were used to restore native plant communities, one of the most extensive programmes ever designed to combine public access, recreation and environmental habitat restoration. A nursery was set up to facilitate the propagation of native plants. In the early days, additional nurseries were even used to allow the planting of an additional hundred thousand native species each year. 
But let’s get back to the game. Since 2015, The Links at Spanish Bay has co-hosted the PGA, LPGA and Champions tournaments during the TaylorMade Pebble Beach Invitational, presented by Dell Technologies. This course has also hosted events such as the Shivas Irons Games of The Links and NorCal Toyota Challenge, but the course’s environmentally sensitive habitat areas limit the gallery to 5000 people, so it can never host PGA TOUR level tournaments. In any event, Spanish Bay is ranked among the best public courses in the state and country, and hosts pros annually at the TaylorMade Pebble Beach Invitational.