El Encín Golf Course

Overview: El Encín Golf Course is an 18-hole layout in Alcalá de Henares, within the wider Madrid golf region. Von Hagge, Smelek and Baril designed a course with generous fairway width, large sculpted greens and a strong emphasis on the relationship between the tee shot and the next approach. The landscape is open and modern, with shaped land and bunkers providing definition instead of dense woodland. That gives the course a clear visual rhythm, but it does not make it simple: the size of the greens creates several possible targets, while the best angle can depend on avoiding a bunker or leaving the correct side for the following putt. It is a strategic, contemporary test that can be played in several different ways.

History: El Encín was inaugurated in 2011 as a major public golf project in the Madrid area. The design team of Von Hagge, Smelek and Baril used the scale of the site to create wide corridors and expressive green complexes rather than copying a traditional tree-lined parkland model. Since opening, the course has developed a reputation for combining a generous sense of space with demanding recovery choices. Its location near Alcalá de Henares also places it in a region where golf, agricultural land and historic cultural sites meet.

Did You Know? The large greens are one of El Encín's defining architectural ideas. Their size gives the player more than one visual target, but it also makes the position of the flag and the approach angle especially important. A shot that finds the putting surface can still leave a very different chance depending on which section of the green it reaches.