Going for Golf

The modern wonders of Belek

Sueno

Since then I’ve marvelled at the speed and smoothness with which high-quality layouts, five-star hotels and holiday-home estates have sprung to life from their drawing-board origins. Over the past 18 months, though, no new courses have opened – a hiatus that’s not really a bi-product of the recession, more a case of Belek taking a breather to assess its whirlwind transformation after a couple of thousand years when not much happened at all. Like its man-made links with antiquity (most notably the Greco-Roman amphitheatres at places like Aspendos, Side and Perge) the area’s natural attributes – golden, sandy beaches; extensive pine and eucalyptus forest; and the Taurus Mountains’ glistening, snow-capped peaks – remain unspoiled by this development. Yet despite nestling in the very cradle of civilisation, Belek’s golf facilities are impressively state-of-the-art.

With their sweeping contours, strategic challenges and picturesque views, the Pines and Dunes courses at Sueno Golf Club represent a particularly ambitious project that is setting a new standard for the game in Turkey. Longer and narrower than its sister course, the Pines is much the tougher of the two 18-hole layouts. Measuring more than 7,000 yards from the championship tees, it presents a serious challenge to low-handicap players and could well become a European Tour venue in the fullness of time.

As its name suggests, the Pines is heavily wooded with mature trees that provide a stunning backdrop and strategic shape to the fairways and greens. Employing the wild shaping of a typical links course and a natural style of bunkering, this layout has a rugged and eye-challenging beauty as well as posing a tough but fair test of golf. Even though it opened as recently as November 2007, the greens already seem mature with immaculate surfaces, true rolls and, in places, some helter-skelter borrows.

Any complacency a player may feel about the Pines will soon be humbled by a succession of memorable holes on the front nine where a premium is placed on course management and shrewd ball positioning rather than bludgeoning length from the tee.

The short par-four fifth, for instance, measures 350 yards, but has a classic risk-reward format thanks to its split-fairway design – taking the tight line down the left cuts the corner of a slight dogleg to set up a short, open approach while the safer line to the right creates a longer shot at a more awkward angle. The pick of the holes on the back nine is the mammoth, pine-clad par-five 15th. The drive can be directed almost anywhere but the closer we get to the green the tighter the fairway becomes until a waste bunker wraps around the front left of the approach.

With more obvious strategic challenges and memorable views, the Dunes is the resort golfer’s option at Sueno, though at more than 6,500 yards it will punish poor play. This delightfully picturesque course makes use of the natural sand features on site and even though it mirrors the links-like shaping of the Pines it has more conventional bunker positioning and less obtrusive water hazards. Like the Pines, it already seems well-established – remarkable considering it has been open for only just more than two years. But despite its ‘resort’ character, the Dunes still boasts several holes that would not be out of place on championship courses.

Particularly of note is the par-four eighth which measures considerably less than 400 yards but is awkward for short and longer hitters alike. The drive to a dramatically narrowing fairway has to carry water, then avoid a further lake to the left and a long fairway bunker flanked by a line of trees to the right. That achieved, a gentle right-to-left approach to a tilting, diagonal green requires precision if the ball is to hold the putting surface and not be rejected by the slope.

An unusual touch means that the 18th greens on both the Dunes and Pines are, in effect, islands surrounded by the serpentine lake that snakes in front of the Sueno resort’s superb 178-bedroom hotel.

It is the proud boast of management that whenever you stay at Sueno, you are always on the golf course. Wherever you are – in your room, the outdoor swimming pool, one of four restaurants or three bars on site, the spa or fitness centre, the lobby perhaps – what you see is endless greenery.