Le Touquet La Mer: The Walk Is Worth It
- Gunnar Kobin
- May 18
- 5 min read
If you stay in Le Touquet for a golf week, this is the course you build the schedule around. Le Touquet La Mer is what put the town on the golfing map a century ago, and after a long restoration it is gradually getting its old reputation back. The current French ranking has it at or near the top of links courses in the country. After playing it once, I can see why.
We had eight in Le Touquet for the week, a Côte d'Opale, Normandy and Brittany swing. I had booked us on La Mer for the morning of the second day, which on paper is sensible scheduling and in practice was a bit of a baptism. Second week of May, ten degrees on the thermometer, a damp cold of the kind you only really get on the Channel coast. The forecast had said warmer. The forecast had lied.
The first thing about playing La Mer is that you need to be ready to walk before you have even hit a shot. The clubhouse, which is a striking modern building with a roofline shaped like a row of tents, was built on the forest side of the resort. La Mer's first tee is roughly seven minutes the other way through woods and over a road. The walk is signposted and pleasant enough, but it does mean you arrive at the first tee already breathing, with your hands warm and your driver in your grip. My advice is to spend less time in the clubhouse than you think and set off in good time. Nothing ruins the start of a round like having to apologise to the group already on the tee.
A short bit of history. La Mer was designed by Harry Colt and his partner Hugh Alison and opened in 1931. Colt is the same architect behind Royal Portrush, the New Course at Sunningdale, the West at Wentworth and the work at Muirfield. La Mer hosted six French Opens, the last won by Seve Ballesteros in 1977. Four of Colt's original seaside holes were destroyed during the German occupation in the Second World War, fortified into the dunes for coastal defence, and when the course reopened in 1959 it was effectively a fourteen-hole layout with four holes borrowed from sister course La Forêt. A long restoration by Patrice Boissonnas and Frank Pont, working from pre-war aerial photographs, has put La Mer back close to Colt's original routing. The course you play today is, more or less, the course Seve never quite saw.
The opening holes feel Irish. That was the first thing one of our group said on the second tee, and it captured something accurate. The first is a long par five through proper links ground. The second is a long par three perched up in dunes. The third runs back through humps and hollows that would not look out of place in Donegal. Firm fairways, exposed lies, rough that gets thinner and sandier as it climbs through the mounds, wind doing what it wants regardless of what you have planned. It is not Portrush, nothing is Portrush, but for the first hour I had to keep reminding myself this was France and not the west of Ireland.
The second hole is where I gave a couple of strokes back. A 175-metre par three, with the pin on a slope that morning where anything coming in above hole-high pace was always going to scoot well past. I hit a six iron, the ball ended up on the wrong side of the slope, and five went on the card. The mistake was not really in the tee shot. The mistake was not looking carefully enough at where the flag actually was before I committed to a line.
After the opening stretch, the course shifts character. The middle of the front nine plays more like parkland, with trees back in the picture, the wind eased by the dune ridges, and a flatter sort of feeling that wouldn't be out of place at a quieter French club. It is a strange transition the first time you walk it, as if two different golf clubs have been stitched together by the routing, but it works. By the turn you have already played two clearly different kinds of golf.
The back nine is where the land gets bigger. From the tenth onward the course climbs back into rolling dune country and stays there. Greens start sitting up on mounds, fairways rise and dip, holes turn out of corners you cannot see from the tee. The back nine of La Mer is more spectacular than anything we played at Hardelot the day before, and it is where Colt's routing really announces itself. You are walking on a piece of land that was clearly meant for a golf course long before anyone built one on it.
A word about the greens. Across our three Côte d'Opale rounds, the surfaces at La Mer were noticeably the best. Not by a huge margin, but consistently better roll, better pace, better trueness underfoot. Hardelot's two courses had had perfectly fine greens, just slow and slightly bouncy. La Mer felt like a real step up. The team there clearly know what they are doing with the maintenance schedule, and the difference shows.
The seventeenth is the hole that sticks. A 347-metre par four with a fairway that climbs and an approach that climbs harder, into a green sitting on top of a small dune. You cannot really see the putting surface from where you are hitting your second, and the sensible play is to take a club more than you think, aim for the middle, and let the slope behind the pin save anything long. I did not quite manage any of that. Six went on the card. Several of our group made worse. It is the kind of seventeenth that ensures nobody in your group walks off the back nine with the score they had quietly been hoping for an hour earlier.
A few honest critiques. The signposting on the way out to the first tee is good, but the signposting between holes on the back nine is patchy in places, especially the transitions out of the dunes and back toward the higher ground. We did not get lost as such, but we paused more than once to look at the yardage book. And the new clubhouse, gorgeous as it is, is too far from the course to really feel like a links clubhouse. You miss the quick walk back in for a coffee at the turn.
Final word. La Mer was one of the best courses we played in this part of France, and one of the best I have played anywhere on the continent. It rewards the patient player, it punishes the impatient one, and it sits on a piece of land that is exactly what a links should be. If you only have time for one round at Le Touquet, this is it. If you have two days, play La Mer in the morning of the first day, when you are fresh and curious, and play it again on the last morning, when you know what it has been asking you. You will get more out of it the second time.
Read also my other blogs from the same region
