Golf d'Hardelot Les Dunes: The Quiet Half of a Famous Address
- Gunnar Kobin
- May 18
- 6 min read
Hardelot sits about twenty minutes down the coast from Le Touquet, where the eight of us had set up base for a week of golf across the Côte d'Opale, Normandy and Brittany. The drive south is pleasant enough — pines on either side of the road, the occasional flash of yellow sand where the real dunes show through — and you pull into Golf d'Hardelot already half-decided that you like the look of the place.
There are two courses on site. Les Pins is the famous one, a Tom Simpson design that gets all the magazine attention, and that is the one we played in the afternoon. I managed to open the trip by drawing my very first tee shot of the week into the pine tree next to the ladies' tee. It is unwritten golf rule every man knows that this will lead to beers for the whole group and I had ticked that box before anyone else had even reached the second fairway. By the time we went back out that afternoon to play Les Pins, I already had a bar tab building and no particular expectations of the second course.
I did not expect to like it as much as I did.
A note on the name, since it bothered me all the way around. There are no dunes on Les Dunes. The course is cut entirely through pine forest, and the only sand you actually see from inside the routing is what's in the bunkers. From a couple of the higher tees you catch a glimpse of the real dunes off in the distance toward the coast, but they have nothing to do with the playing field. Why this course got named Les Dunes when its older sister already had Les Pins is one of those small questions I couldn't get a good answer to.
The course itself was designed by the Belgian architect Paul Rolin with the French designer Jean-Claude Cornillot, and opened in 1991. That puts it almost sixty years after Tom Simpson laid out Les Pins a kilometre or so down the road, which is a long enough gap that you wouldn't expect the two layouts to feel like siblings, and they don't.
More than anything else, the place is hilly. Properly hilly for this stretch of coast. Fairways rise and fall between corridors of trees, tee boxes are often perched well above the landing area, and a few of the green sites sit on small natural plateaus that don't show themselves until you're almost on top of them. Taking a buggy here would be a mistake. You miss too much of what the ground is doing under your feet.
It is narrow as well. There's a par 4 on the front, the fourth, that I won't forget for a while. Around four hundred metres between two ridges of pines, very little margin on either side. The fairways are generous enough where they exist, but Les Dunes asks you to be sure about which side you are missing on. Miss left on a hole that bends left, and you aren't playing your next shot. You're searching for the one you just hit.
The opening hole is a good preview of the day to come. Three hundred and eleven metres, downhill, par 4. Looks easy on the card and isn't. The fairway is a tilted strip between the pines, the green is small, and the front of it slopes hard enough that anything pitched short comes rolling twenty metres back into the rough. A few of us made six. One of our group made worse. Whoever laid this course out wanted you to know early that par 70 was going to take some earning.
The greens themselves were fine. Not fast in any meaningful sense, but with a real amount of slope on them. Not vertigo stuff, just genuine slope, and almost always tilted toward bunkers or water rather than away. You could be twelve feet away and walk off with three putts because the read had been on the wrong tier the whole time. Reasonable greens, in other words, that punished careless approach play harder than they punished bad putting.
The old-school feel comes through quickly. By the second hole, a par 3 across a small valley with bunkers cut into the slope short of the green, you start to notice what isn't there. No artificial water features. No infinity edges. No exaggerated mounding shaped by a landscape architect with a brief. Just bunkers in roughly the right places, contours that funnel balls toward trouble on their own, and tee boxes pointing you down avenues of pine.
The course was very peaceful when we started. We went off the first early in the afternoon and had nothing in front of us and nothing behind. No starter chasing us along, no buggies cutting across, no halfway house with a speaker pumping music two holes away. The only sounds we picked up were our four-ball, the wind through the trees, and the occasional crack of a ball glancing off a pine trunk. By the time we walked back to the clubhouse the first tee had filled in a bit, with twilight-rate players starting to come through, but for most of our round it had felt like a private course. After a couple of busy weeks of golf earlier in the spring, that kind of silence cost nothing and felt like a lot.
The eighth is the hole on the front nine that takes most cards apart. A par 5 around 465 metres long, climbing the whole way from tee to green, half-blind in places. The fairway pinches in right where you would want to be aggressive with the second shot, and the green sits up a slope, so anything short of perfect with a wedge rolls off it back down toward you. Most amateurs are going to make six or worse here on a normal day and not feel like they did very much wrong.
The back nine is, on balance, the better half. Not by a wide margin. The front has its good moments too. But the routing finds a rhythm coming home that the outward nine never quite settles into. Twelve has a dogleg through a corridor that feels hand-carved. Fourteen is a 183-metre par 3 with everything in front of you that you don't want to deal with: front bunkers, a drop-off long, no easy bail-out. It quietly talks you into taking an extra club without saying so. And the sixteenth, at 281 metres, is one of those drivable par 4s where the smart play and the fun play are different shots entirely. Most of our two groups had a swing at it. The scorecards reflected, let's say, a mixed set of outcomes.
A couple of honest gripes. The bunkering was inconsistent. Some of the traps were soft and almost beach-like, others packed in a way that plugged the ball, and you couldn't tell from outside which type you were dropping into. The signage between some of the holes could use work; we wandered the wrong way coming off the twelfth and had to backtrack a couple of hundred metres to find the next tee box. And the stretch from ten through twelve does feel a touch perfunctory in places, as if the architect were joining up two stronger pieces of land and wasn't entirely sure what to do with the middle.
What Les Dunes does well, though, it does very well. It is a proper golf course, in the sense that the design trusts the land rather than fights it, the bunkers are in places where trouble would exist even without them, and the green complexes ask you a question rather than shout one at you. You can play it badly and still walk off smiling. Play it well and the score genuinely feels like it was earned.
When we ranked our favourite rounds at the end of the trip — nine in total across the Côte d'Opale, Normandy and Brittany — most of the group had Les Dunes inside their top three. That genuinely caught me by surprise at the time. The more I have thought about it since, the less of a surprise it probably should have been.
Would I drive all the way back to Hardelot just to play Les Dunes on its own? Probably not, and on that question I appear to be in the minority. But as a stop on a wider trip, sitting next to Les Pins or as part of a longer loop south through Normandy and Brittany, it more than earns its place. It is not billed as the headline. It just happens to be the round most people ended up talking about three days later.
And honestly, a quiet Monday morning in May, walking the ninth and tenth fairways with nobody in sight, was about as good a way to spend a few hours as the trip had to offer.
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