Nuwara Eliya Golf Club

The Nuwara Eliya Golf Club, founded in 1889, is one of the oldest golf clubs in Asia. It is an institution, rich in tradition, history and carries an ambience unparalleled in this country.

Founded, primarily for their rest and recreation, by the British planters who opened up the land for tea in the Nuwara Eliya district, to this day it caters to some of the customs and traditions of the country’s colonial past. This quaint admixture of old-world charm and modern trappings invests it with a special aura and is the essence of its attractiveness.

The beginnings of modern Nuwara Eliya were essentially British. Uninhabited when the British came to Ceylon it was accidentally discovered by Dr. John Davy brother of Sir Humphrey Davy, the famous chemist while on a hunting party in 1818, and was made into a health resort and sanatorium for British officials in 1828 by Sir Edward Barnes, the Governor of the Island at the time. Barnes incidentally built a mansion for himself. “Barnes Hall”, which today, after considerable alterations exists as the Grand Hotel. The town itself did not extend beyond some amenities for the military and a few residential and other buildings, until the arrival in 1847 of Sir Samuel Baker. Baker was an explorer and entrepreneur who established a settlement in Nuwara Eliya and went to the extent of importing all the appurtenances of an English country town.

The Golf Course located in Nuwara Eliya, known the world over for the premier quality of the tea produced in the plantations that surround the club. Despite being situated just a stone’s throw from the town, the club still maintains an air of exclusivity, a desirable apartness, so that when one enters its gates one is transported to a world that has been left behind by the march of history.

The 18-hole course, 6399 yards long, is a testing par 71 and is made up of long , narrow fairways, bordered by rows of towering eucalyptus trees and elegant cypresses, held together by dense acacia shrubbery. Good positional play is must for a positive outcome and the course terrain, with its succession of undulating dales and hills, and the many water hazards.