Mauritian Marvel

A new links-style course, co-designed by Louis Oosthuizen, is set to raise the bar for golf on the Indian Ocean island nation. By Nick Bayly

THE GREEN ZONE This picture: the 18th at La Réserve Golf Links. Inset: Louis Oosthuizen (left) and Peter Matkovich, co-designers of the course

After visiting the country in 1896, legendary American writer Mark Twain is claimed to have described the magical tropical island of Mauritius as God’s blueprint for heaven. Twain was way ahead of his time in many ways, but he was certainly ahead of the game when it came to planning his holidays, as it is only in the past 25 years or so that this enchanting island paradise, located some 800km (500 miles) east of Madagascar, has come into its own as a prelapsarian hideaway.

Golfers have had to be slightly more patient as, with the glorious exception of the Gymkhana Golf Club, which first opened in 1844, there was nothing worth travelling halfway around the world to play until the opening of Belle Mare Plage’s Legend course in 1994. Since then, the golfing floodgates have opened, and amateurs can now take their pick from nine 18-hole championship layouts and four excellent nine-hole courses.

The latest to join the fray, and push the number of tracks into double digits, is La Réserve Golf Links, which is located hard on the island’s southwestern coast. Co-designed by 2010 Open Champion Louis Oosthuizen and acclaimed architect Peter Matkovich – who also designed Heritage Golf Club’s other, neighbouring course, Le Château – it is being touted as the Indian Ocean’s first genuine links layout, set to debut next year.

With its raised tees and elevated greens offering panoramic ocean views from every hole – which isn’t often the case on low-lying links – the 7,185-yard, par-72 championship course, which has already been inked in to host the DP World Tour’s AfrAsia Bank Mauritius Open in early December 2023, is promising to deliver a dramatic golfing experience that looks set to rival that offered at nearby Ile Aux Cerfs, the iconic island course designed by Bernhard Langer, which can only be reached by boat. “It’s a challenging course and will not be for the faint-hearted,” says Oosthuizen, for whom this will be a second design project, after working with Matkovich to design Golden Eagle Links in Swaziland, which opened last year. “We’ve worked with the land to create a strategic, undulating course that plays in the traditional links style, with running fairways, pot bunkers and long grasses. The location is breathtakingly beautiful with incredible views of the Indian Ocean.”

Situated adjacent to a Unesco Biosphere Reserve, home to a myriad of birds and wildlife, the new course’s impact on the local environment is being carefully monitored, with former sugar-cane fields having been sensitively cultivated with native island grasses, creating new, speciesrich grasslands, encouraging ecological diversity and valuable carbon sequestration. All of which ensures that Mauritius – unlike Twain’s (albeit misattributed) other declaration about golf being “a good walk spoiled” – remains as pristine as ever. heritagegolfclub.mu