Portola Country Club

Overview: At Portola, the 18-hole executive par-3 course is set inside a gated 55-plus community in Palm Desert. The official site describes a challenging short course surrounded by homes, greenbelts and community amenities, while course records list a par of 54 and roughly 2,134 yards. Water appears frequently and the holes are designed around touch, trajectory and placement rather than full-length driving.

History: Portola began as a manufactured-home community project in the late 1960s, with course construction starting in 1970. The community history credits Cecil Hollingsworth with the course and clubhouse and explains that the original nine-hole layout included holes in a wash. Flooding permanently removed four of those original holes, after which the course evolved into the current 18-hole executive experience.

Did You Know? Portola’s seven lakes are still part of the course’s visual language, even though the community history records that flooding changed the original holes in the wash. The short holes can still be demanding because narrow playing corridors and water leave little room for careless distance control. It is a good example of how an executive course can be shaped by both desert engineering and natural drainage.