Naples

Naples is where American golfers move when they stop working, and the visiting golfer benefits from standards they did nothing to establish. Collier County has the highest per-capita course density in the country, the result of a six-decade migration of wealthy retirees who built private clubs faster than anyone else could keep up. Most of those clubs sit behind firm gates. You drive past them on your way to something else.

What sits on the other side of those gates is the story worth telling. Naples and the surrounding communities of Bonita Springs, Estero, and Marco Island support roughly a dozen courses that welcome daily-fee play, and the conditioning across them runs higher than most visitors expect. The private clubs set the maintenance bar for the entire region. The public-access courses compete for the same demographic of retirees who left clubs in Connecticut and refuse to tolerate ragged bunkers, so they meet the standard or they die.