Zimbali Lakes: A Course in Its Second Summer

Most of the courses on this coast have had decades to settle. Durban Country Club has had more than a century. Zimbali Lakes has had one summer.

It opened for play in April 2025. The clubhouse followed a year later, officially opening on 21 April 2026. The club describes it as South Africa’s newest golf course, and two kinds of golfer will read that line differently. One has left a northern winter behind and is about to meet a course in its second summer, in the heat and humidity its greens were chosen for. The other has played this coast for years and has finally found a course here they cannot already know. For both of them, it is a first round.

Most of what has been written about it so far is about the property around it. This piece is about the golf.

The Land Before the Golf

The site was rolling coastal ground, some of it natural vegetation and some of it land that had been farmed. The club credits the course to Golf Data, a South African golf course and landscape company, working in collaboration with Ernie Els. Golf Course Architecture reported that Golf Data consulted Els and his design partner Greg Letsche on the routing, and that the approach was to work with the contours that were already there rather than move the ground to fit a plan.

Els is the name on the course that most golfers will know, and they will know it from different places. A British golfer will remember him lifting the Claret Jug at Muirfield in 2002 and again at Royal Lytham & St Annes in 2012. An American will remember his US Open wins at Oakmont in 1994 and Congressional in 1997. A South African golfer will remember all four. Here, his design firm put its name to a course on the coast of his own country.

That shows in the scorecard. It is an eighteen-hole, par-72 course that the club lists at 6,019 metres. It is not a long course. It asks for decisions rather than distance.

How It Plays

The balance is even: four par 5s and four par 3s. Every par 3, in the North Coast Courier’s account of the opening, asks for a carry over trouble from the tee. The club lists water features on six holes.

The par-5 13th runs parallel to the N2, and it is where the Courier’s reviewer found the real test beginning: three accurate shots, and trouble if you miss right. From there the course climbs. In the Courier’s account, the 18th tees off from one of the course’s highest points, towards the ocean. The lowest ground is down at the water that wraps around the 2nd and 3rd.

The club’s Director of Golf, Thinus Rosslee, uses the signature 18th to explain the design. The 18th, he says, “encourages golfers to make a decision off the tee”: play safe for position, or take the aggressive line for a shorter approach.

Greens Built for Humidity

Bentgrass is a cool-season grass. It is not the obvious choice for a humid, salty coastline in a subtropical summer.

Zimbali Lakes chose it anyway, in a strain called Super 7. Speaking in 2024 as the resort’s senior vice-president of operations, Wayne Krambeck said it “handles humidity and the salt content in the air.” The fairways are Royal Blue cynodon, a warm-season grass.

This is the season that tests those greens. A golfer who plays Zimbali Lakes between November and February is putting on bentgrass in exactly the conditions it was chosen to survive.

The water that keeps the course alive is the part most golfers will never see. Irrigation runs on recycled grey water from Siza Water, the local utility, supplemented by water rights to the Tongati River. No drinking water is used to irrigate it.

Why We Include Zimbali Lakes

STA builds every journey outward from a course. On the KwaZulu-Natal coast, that means choosing between courses with a century of championship golf behind them and one with a single summer. We include Zimbali Lakes because that choice should exist.

A golfer can play Durban Country Club, Zimbali Country Club and Zimbali Lakes in the same week and see how differently three generations of architects have read one coastline. Zimbali Country Club, founded in 1998, is more than a quarter of a century older than Zimbali Lakes. Durban Country Club is older still. Both follow later in this series.

A new course has no history to lean on. What Zimbali Lakes has instead is a first summer already behind it, and a second one about to start.

Zimbali Lakes at a Glance