Boca Raton Resort Golf Club

The Boca Raton Resort Golf Club — now known as the Harborside Course at The Boca Raton — is one of Florida's most historic resort courses, originally opened in 1928 on the grounds of Addison Mizner's iconic Mediterranean Revival resort complex and updated over the decades to maintain its status as a well-regarded resort golf experience. The course plays alongside Intracoastal waterways and mature Florida landscape, providing a demanding and scenic round within walking distance of the resort's famous pink-toned landmark hotel.

The golf history at Boca Raton Resort reaches back to 1925, when society architect Addison Mizner's development corporation commissioned Donald Ross to lay out an 18-hole golf course alongside the Cloister Inn. Ross completed the course in 1926, routing it across El Camino Real with holes 1 through 11, 17, and 18 on the north side of the road and holes 12 through 16 on the south side — an unusual split configuration that reflected the compressed timeline of Florida's 1920s land boom. When Mizner's corporation collapsed in bankruptcy in 1927, Clarence Geist purchased the property and hired the Philadelphia partnership of Howard Toomey and William Flynn to redesign the golf program. Toomey and Flynn used existing portions of the Ross routing as a foundation while reconfiguring the overall layout into two 18-hole courses, the North and South.

Both courses officially opened in January 1930. Flynn's work established the architectural DNA that subsequent architects would return to across the following decades. The Boca Raton Resort property, incorporated into the town that was formally established in May 1925, sits at the center of one of South Florida's most storied resort histories — Mizner's Mediterranean Revival architecture defining the original character of the resort complex that has operated continuously for nearly a century. In the mid-1950s, Robert Trent Jones completed minor improvements to the course.

Joe Lee undertook more extensive renovations in 1988, modernizing the conditioning standards while preserving the course's historic routing character. In 1997, architect Gene Bates oversaw the complete reconstruction of the golf course in a $6.5 million redesign that included the complete redesign and reconfiguration of each of the course's 18 holes — the most substantial intervention since Flynn's original 1930 work. A further renovation followed in 2016 to improve playability and refresh the course without compromising its historical continuity. The course's longevity has earned it a place on the Florida Historic Golf Trail, a program administered by the Florida Department of State that recognizes courses of demonstrable historical and architectural significance to the state's golf heritage.

The Florida Department of State highlighted the resort course as its featured Florida Historic Golf Trail Course of the Month in 2018, citing the property's nearly century-long history of continuous golf operation dating to the Ross design of 1926. The 1930 Toomey-Flynn courses trace through the heart of the resort property, now rebranded as The Boca Raton. A major course renovation led by architect Brian Silva was announced with a projected course closure in April 2026 and a reopening in fall 2026. The renovation will include excavating, reshaping, and redesigning each hole, installing a new irrigation system, and reimagining approximately one-third of the holes to introduce refined strategy, while the remaining holes will retain their original routing enhanced through careful reshaping — continuing nearly a century of iterative reinvestment in one of Florida's most historically significant resort golf properties.