Olympic Golf Course

Overview: Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic Golf Course lies in the Marapendi reserve, where Gil Hanse and his team created an 18-hole layout on a sandy coastal site. The course has the broad visual language of a links, with generous fairway corridors, native vegetation and irregular sandy hazards, but its character is shaped by Rio’s heat, wind and low coastal landscape. Hanse’s design leaves room for different lines from the tee, then asks players to read the ground and choose carefully around the greens. The result is a course that rewards imagination as much as length.

History: The International Golf Federation selected Gil Hanse and Amy Alcott to develop the Olympic venue ahead of Rio 2016. Construction was tied to a difficult environmental brief: create a championship course while retaining the ecological character of the Marapendi Natural Reserve. The course opened for the 2016 Olympic competition, then continued as part of the Games’ sporting legacy, bringing a modern public-facing golf venue to Rio’s Barra da Tijuca district.

Did You Know? Rio 2016 marked golf’s return to the Olympic programme after a 112-year absence. The course therefore has two identities in its history: it is a contemporary Hanse design built around coastal ecology, and it is the physical stage for the event that restored Olympic golf to the modern Games.