Pasatiempo Golf Club

Pasatiempo opened in 1929 as the centerpiece of Marion Hollins' Santa Cruz development, and Alister MacKenzie liked it enough to build his American home alongside the sixth fairway and live there until he died in 1934. He considered it his finest design—the only MacKenzie course open to the public that he ranked at the very top of his own work.

It's an unusual par 70 that finishes on a par 3, routed across rolling downland cut by deep barrancas that swallow anything loose. Between 2023 and 2024, Jim Urbina stripped all eighteen greens and bunkers back to MacKenzie's 1929 shapes and re-grassed the greens in bentgrass—so what you play today is as close to the original as it has been in decades. The 16th, MacKenzie's favorite, is the one you'll remember.

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The 16th — MacKenzie's favorite

MacKenzie called the 16th the finest two-shot hole he ever designed. The tee shot is semi-blind to a fairway shelf that falls away right-to-left; the approach then has to hold a green split into three tiers above a barranca, where anything long or left tumbles into ravine and ruin. Restored to its 1929 contours in 2024, its putting surface is one of the most feared in golf.