Dar Es Salam Royal Golf Club (Red Course)

Overview: The Red Course at Dar Es Salam Royal Golf Club is the championship heart of Rabat’s 45-hole royal golf domain. Designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., it runs through a broad cork-oak setting where tree-lined corridors, water and carefully placed bunkers make position as important as power. The routing is known for its demanding green complexes and for the famous ninth, where the putting surface sits in a lake and demands a confident carry. At par 73 and 7,302 yards in the directory record, it is a long, strategic parkland test whose visual calm conceals a serious examination of distance control and angle of play.

History: The course was created at the initiative of King Hassan II and opened in 1971, helping establish Morocco as an international golf destination. The Red course became the principal stage for the Hassan II Golf Trophy and has remained closely associated with tournament golf. A major restoration and re-leveling program ran from 2015 to 2018 under James Duncan, working from Jones’s original drawings while renewing tees, greens, bunkers and water-management systems. The work modernized the facility without erasing the character that made the original course distinctive.

Did You Know? The ninth hole is the course’s signature image: a green set in a large lily pond, with the approach played across water. Royal Golf Dar Es Salam describes the crossing as 172 metres, making the hole memorable not only for its setting but also for the precision required before the round turns toward the demanding back nine.