Hencse National Golf & Country Club

Overview: Hencse National Golf and Country Club is an 18-hole, par-72 parkland course in the rolling Zselic region of southern Hungary. The layout occupies about 90 hectares of woodland and open ground, with natural lakes, streams and roughly 26,000 mature trees shaping the route. Thomas Himmel and the wider design team created a course where the scenery is not simply background: water and tree placement repeatedly influence the safer side of a fairway and the best approach angle. The current scorecard reaches about 7,160 yards.

History: The course opened in 1994 on a former estate landscape that includes the late-Baroque Márffy Mansion. It was developed as a championship-scale parkland course at a time when modern golf facilities were beginning to expand in Hungary, and the layout quickly became known as European Lakes before returning to the Hencse National name. The club has kept the mature character of the property central to its identity, allowing the old trees, lakes and mansion setting to remain part of the experience rather than replacing them with a heavily manufactured resort landscape.

Did You Know? Hencse's course is arranged around a remarkably large number of established trees for a modern Hungarian layout. The estate atmosphere is reinforced by the Márffy Mansion and the quiet Zselic hills, while the lakes give the round a changing rhythm. It is possible to play several holes in succession through woodland and then emerge into more open ground, which helps the course feel larger than the scorecard alone suggests.