Bear Lakes Country Club: Links Course

The Links is a Jack Nicklaus interpretation of seaside golf built on flat South Florida terrain, distinguished from its sister Lakes Course by aggressively shaped mounding, fescue-fringed corridors, and deep pot-style bunkers intended to simulate the ground game of the British Isles. Its exaggerated shaping around the greens creates the kind of unpredictable bounces rarely found in Palm Beach County.

The Links Course at Bear Lakes Country Club opened in 1987 as the second 18 on the property, roughly three years after the club's original Lakes Course debuted in 1984. Both courses were designed by Jack Nicklaus, giving Bear Lakes one of the earliest 36-hole Nicklaus installations in South Florida. Where the Lakes Course was laid out in a more traditional Florida parkland style, Nicklaus used the Links routing to depart from the regional template, shaping the ground aggressively on what was essentially a flat, featureless tract just west of downtown West Palm Beach.

The result is a layout framed by deep, steep-faced bunkers, rolling fairway contours and firm green complexes that Nicklaus intended to reference the traits of a seaside Scottish links. Approximately 100 bunkers are distributed across the holes, and many of the greens are perched or contoured so balls can release, skip and roll rather than plug on arrival. The Links plays to a par of 72 and stretches to roughly 7,392 yards from the championship tees, making it the longer and more exposed of the two Bear Lakes layouts.

After the Lakes Course was renovated under Jack Nicklaus's direction in 2003, the Links remained largely as it had been built, which over time exposed the limitations of its aging turf, drainage and bunker infrastructure. In 2024, the club announced that Davis Love III, working with his brother Mark Love and lead architect Scot Sherman, had been retained to reimagine the Links Course. The team concluded early in the process that a true Scottish-style links in South Florida was not feasible and instead drew inspiration from the work of Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor, envisioning a course with geometric green sites, template holes and strategic bunkering that would set it apart from the many Florida courses built on similar flat terrain.

Construction began in 2024 with completion targeted for November 2026, during which time the Links is scheduled to be closed and members play the Lakes Course. The renovation will effectively retire the 1987 Nicklaus routing and replace it with a Davis Love III layout, ending a run of nearly four decades in which the Links offered a Nicklaus alternative to its Lakes sibling on the same property. The Bear Lakes clubhouse anchors the member experience for both courses and sits a few minutes from downtown West Palm Beach, placing the 36-hole facility among the closer private clubs to the city center.