Your Winter, Our Summer

Between November and February, a golfer in London or New York is playing through the shortest, coldest days of the year, if they are playing at all. On the KwaZulu-Natal coast of South Africa, those are the summer months.

That is not the same as saying summer is the best time to play here. Ask a local golfer when this coast plays best and you are likely to hear winter. The air is dry and the mornings are mild. They are right. Summer on the KwaZulu-Natal coast is the wet season, and the humidity is usually up before you are.

So this is not an argument that summer here is easy. It is an argument that this summer is the one to come for.

The Dunhill Comes to Durban

On 16 September 2026 the Alfred Dunhill Championship announced a new venue. From 25 to 28 February 2027 it will be played at Durban Country Club, co-sanctioned by the DP World Tour and the Sunshine Tour. The event has never been held there before.

If you follow the DP World Tour at home, look out for it. The tour is broadcast in Britain and Ireland by Sky Sports and in the United States by Golf Channel. In late February, the course on the screen will be a Durban course that opened in the dunes in 1922.

The tours have been finding their way back to this stretch of coast for a while. Durban Country Club hosted the Jonsson Workwear Durban Open in February 2026. In September 2026 the Sunshine Tour came back to Mount Edgecombe. More professional golf may follow this summer, and we will name it when the schedules are published.

Watching a tour event from the other side of the world is one thing. This summer, you can play the same coast in the same season.

Five Courses, One Coast

Durban sits on South Africa’s Indian Ocean coast, and STA’s golf selection in the province runs up the coast from the city to KwaDukuza. Five courses, each picked for a reason the rest of this series will set out.

Durban Country Club is the city course, the one the professionals will play in February. It is No. 4 in the SA Top 100 Courses list for 2026.

Mount Edgecombe, north of Durban, has two eighteen-hole layouts. The Woods was laid out by Sid Brews in the mid-1930s and upgraded by Hugh Baiocchi in 1992. On The Lakes, the eighth and ninth run alongside Pani Dam.

Zimbali Country Club is Tom Weiskopf’s design on the north coast, No. 18 in the same 2026 list. From the twelfth hole to the eighteenth, the course runs through indigenous forest.

Zimbali Lakes is the newest of the five: a course built by Golf Data in collaboration with Ernie Els, opened in April 2025.

Prince’s Grant, near KwaDukuza, is a Peter Matkovich design set between sugar cane fields and the Indian Ocean, No. 31 in the 2026 list.

Over the next five pieces we take each one in turn: what it asks of you off the tee, and what sits within reach of it once the round is over.

What the Season Adds

Golf is the reason to come. It is not the whole of it.

Further north, on the Maputaland coast, loggerhead and leatherback turtles come ashore at night to nest from November to January, and the hatchlings make for the sea between December and March. Thonga Beach Lodge runs turtle tracking in season. Nothing about it can be booked for a particular night. The turtles decide.

Inland, the private game reserves of Zululand sit in the same province as the golf. A week on the coast and a few days in the bush can share one trip. That is the part of this journey no winter golf break in Europe or the American south can offer.

If You Already Know This Coast

You may have played Durban Country Club. You have probably not played it in the summer it hosts the Dunhill.

Winter here is the better weather. This is the better year.

The Season at a Glance