La Paz Golf Club

Overview: La Paz Golf Club occupies the Mallasilla area south of La Paz, where the course sits in the high Andean landscape at roughly 3,342 metres above sea level. The 18-hole routing is recorded at par 71 and 6,358 yards in the production profile. Its character comes from the combination of thin high-altitude air, open mountain light, rocky ground and carefully maintained turf. The fairways do not read like a conventional lowland parkland course: broad views and abrupt changes in the surrounding terrain give the holes a strong sense of place, while the scorecard includes several long holes and demanding approaches. Luther Koontz is credited with the design of the current course.

History: The club’s official history traces golf at La Paz to 1912, when British railway employees established a nine-hole course on the Altiplano; it later expanded to 18 holes. The present Mallasilla property was acquired in the middle of the 1940s, and the club describes two years of clearing rocky ground and testing grasses before building the first provisional nine holes on the site. The current record uses 1947 for the course, while the club’s own account presents the development as a sequence rather than a single opening day. That distinction explains why historical sources use both the founding year and the mid-1940s relocation when describing La Paz Golf Club.

Did You Know? The official club history lists the 2004 World Cup among the international events hosted at La Paz. It also records the course at 3,342 metres above sea level, making elevation part of the course’s basic identity: shots travel through a much thinner atmosphere than they would at a coastal or lowland layout.