Golf d'Hardelot Les Pins: The Older Half of a Famous Address
- Gunnar Kobin
- May 18
- 5 min read
Of the two courses at Golf d'Hardelot, Les Pins is the one I would come back to first. I know that puts me in a minority. When our group did the end-of-trip rankings, most of the boys had Les Dunes higher, and on visible terms they are not wrong: Les Dunes is genuinely the more spectacular of the two courses, with the bigger views, the bigger elevation changes and most of the camera moments. Les Pins is older, sandier, less obviously dramatic. It is the kind of old-school parkland that grows on you in the days afterwards rather than impressing you in the moment. It also, somewhat awkwardly for the sister course, has more actual dune character than the course named Les Dunes does.
Some background. We were eight, in Le Touquet for a week of golf across the Côte d'Opale, Normandy and Brittany. Hardelot sits twenty minutes south of Le Touquet on the coast road, an easy morning's drive, and we had put both courses into the same day. Dunes in the morning, Pins in the afternoon, two four-balls off the first.
A short detour into who built the place. Les Pins was designed by Tom Simpson in 1934. Simpson is one of the names you trip over when you read about old European golf architecture: Morfontaine, Cruden Bay, Royal Antwerp, plus a longer list I keep meaning to play. His courses have a recognisable flavour. The bunkering tends to sit in places where good players would naturally bail out to. The fairways do not herd you anywhere in particular. There is usually more than one way to play a hole, and the smart way is rarely the longest one. Ninety years on, all of that is still here in the bones of Les Pins. The course just sits in the forest and lets you make your own choices.
The first thing that hits you, almost from the first tee, is how sandy the ground is. The soil under Hardelot is the same dune sand that built this whole stretch of coast, and you feel it the moment you take a divot. The fairways are firm. Approaches run on. The ball does not check up the way it does on most parkland courses. There is something links-like about the playing surfaces, even though there are pines on every side of you. I kept catching myself thinking it was a piece of links land that had grown a forest by accident.
It is also a more natural-feeling course than its sister. The lines of pines are looser, the routing follows the ground rather than fighting it, and a couple of the holes look like they could have been laid the same way in 1934 with only the markers moved. Less manufactured. Less manicured. More room to think.
The other surprise is width. Where Les Dunes squeezes you between two ridges of pines on plenty of holes, Les Pins gives you room. Not driving-range room, but enough that you do not have to be certain about your line down to the last metre. We played from the yellow tees, which I have to admit is where the course gets a little too friendly to a decent player. There are six par fives. From the yellow tees the first four come in at 471, 421, 435 and 447 metres, all reachable in two if you are striking it well. The longest one on the card, the thirteenth, is 468. Still gettable. That is not a normal par-five experience.
I started birdie-birdie on the two front-nine par fives. Then the doubles started arriving. I will spare you the shot-by-shot, partly because nobody wants to read somebody else's scorecard, partly because I genuinely cannot remember most of it. The back nine got away from me in a string of small mistakes that did not feel like bad golf and somehow added up to one. I closed with a chip-in for a three at the eighteenth, which is the kind of thing that makes the previous four holes go quietly away.
A handful of holes worth flagging. The thirteenth, a par five of 468 metres, opens up after a tee shot through a narrow gap between trees into a green that sits in a natural bowl. One of the prettier corners of the round, and one of the genuine birdie chances if you keep your drive in play. The sixth is the kind of hole Simpson would have been proud of: a tee shot with bail-out options on both sides, a second shot where laying up is a real strategic choice and not just the chicken's, and a green that turns vindictive on you if you have ended up on the wrong tier. The seventeenth, a downhill 150-metre par three, has bunkering tight on both sides and very little ground to bail out onto. The kind of par three you want to be hitting your favourite iron into.
A few honest critiques. From the yellow tees, Les Pins is a touch too generous to a player who keeps the ball in play. I would love to come back and play the back tees, which the board has at 5,919 metres and par 71. That looks like a different golf course. The greens on our day were not fast, which is fine in May but might frustrate someone in the summer. And the bunkering, beautiful as Simpson bunkers tend to be, had been raked unevenly when we got to them.
A small practical tip I wish someone had given us. If you are planning to play both Hardelot courses in one day, take a buggy at Les Dunes and walk Les Pins. We walked both rounds, and by the back nine on Pins in the afternoon some were openly checking watches and asking when this was going to be over. Les Dunes is steep enough that the cart is a real saving on the legs. Les Pins is the better walk anyway, sandy underfoot, easy contours, the kind of course where you catch things on the ground that you would miss rolling past on rubber.
Final word. Of the two Hardelot courses, Les Pins is the one I would put first. Most of the group voted for Dunes on spectacle, which is a fair vote. Dunes has the spectacle. I voted for Simpson, for the older course, for the quieter pleasure. I will probably keep voting that way every time I get the choice. If I had a free morning in this part of France next year, Les Pins would be where I went.
Read also my other blogs from the same region
