The Royal golf clubs of Belgium

Start with Tom Simpson, because for British golfers he is the most familiar hand here. Simpson laid out the original eighteen at Royal Golf Club du Hainaut in 1933, on golden-age heathland near Mons in the country’s south. If you know Simpson’s work at home, you will recognise the thinking the moment you walk the first few holes: greens that ask a precise question, bunkers placed to catch the lazy line rather than the brave one, and a routing that uses the natural lie of the ground instead of fighting it.

He had good help. Charles Warren, the first professional at Royal Zoute, assisted on the project, so there is coast-club pedigree built into the place from the start. The course grew later. In 1990 Martin Hawtree added a third nine, Les Étangs, taking Hainaut to twenty-seven holes. That gives you variety across a stay without ever leaving the property, which is a useful thing on a golf trip.

Robert Trent Jones Sr built courses on five continents and reshaped how the world thought about golf design. He worked in Belgium exactly once, and the result is Royal Bercuit. The course was planned in 1965 by Baron Frédéric Rolin and first played in 1967. It is gently undulating rather than brutal, the kind of land Jones liked to work with when he was building a members’ course rather than a championship test, though it has hosted both European Tour and Ladies European Tour events down the years.

The Royal title came late and meant a great deal. King Philippe granted it in 2017, the club’s fiftieth anniversary, half a century to the year after the first golfers walked the fairways. For anyone who collects the work of the great architects, this is the one Trent Jones course you can play in the country, which makes it worth the detour on its own.

The Hawtree name is woven through Belgian golf more thoroughly than any other. Fred W. Hawtree designed Royal Waterloo’s premier course, La Marache, around 1960, along with two nine-hole courses, and the place has been a fixture of golf near Brussels ever since. Royal Waterloo is the kind of club a touring golfer settles into quickly: a proper championship layout with the shorter courses alongside for a relaxed second round.

The story did not stop with Fred. His son Martin Hawtree returned to the club and, between 2003 and 2006, redesigned and rebuilt every green and bunker to USGA standard. That is rare. You are playing a course with golden-age bones and modern surfaces, drawn by two generations of the same family. Martin’s hand also reaches south to Hainaut, where the Les Étangs nine he added in 1990 sits beside Simpson’s 1933 original. Two clubs, one family, and the better part of half a century of Belgian golf between them.

The north of the country has its own tradition, older and saltier, on the dunes and heathland of the Flanders coast. Royal Zoute at Knokke-Heist is the best known, a classic links-and-heathland course whose first professional, Charles Warren, you have already met down at Hainaut. Nearby sit Royal Latem and Royal Ostend, two more long-established clubs that earned their Royal title the way Belgian clubs do, through age and standing rather than marketing.

These are courses with the firm turf and sea air that British golfers travel for, set among the resort towns of the coast. They make an easy pairing with a stay in Bruges, and they give a Belgian golf trip the one thing the inland clubs cannot: firm seaside turf and wind straight off the North Sea.

The Royal clubs are the headline, but they are not the whole card. A week’s golf has room for more, and Belgium gives you good options close to the main bases. Near Brussels you can add Château de la Tournette and the parkland at Sept Fontaines, both within comfortable reach of a Waterloo base. Up on the coast, around Bruges and the Ypres salient, Damme and Palingbeek round out a stay with flatter, friendlier rounds between the bigger names.

That mix is the point. You build a trip with a couple of the great Royal courses as the centrepiece, then fill the rest with rounds that suit the legs and the budget. Nobody is asking you to play championship golf five days running.

The reason Belgium works so well is the logistics. The coast clubs sit a little over an hour from Calais and even Waterloo is under two, so this is a self-drive trip and a good one. Our ground-only packages include the LeShuttle return car crossing for one vehicle, which means you load your own clubs into your own car, take the tunnel across, and drive between the clubs at your own pace. No baggage charges, and no airport at either end.

The numbers are honest and the prices below are indicative from-prices, on a bed and breakfast basis, with the crossing included. The Van der Valk Hotel Waterloo sits ideally for the inland clubs and starts from £385pp. For the coast and Bruges, Martin’s Brugge starts from £440pp. And for the Ypres side of the trip, Hotel Ariane in Ypres starts from £470pp. We tailor the courses and the order to suit you, and we are happy to talk it through before anything is booked.