For most of the past several years, anyone on the cart paths near West Beach passed a fence line nobody paid much attention to. Fairways gone soft with weeds. A maintenance crew that showed up just often enough to keep the grass from turning into brush. Ask a neighbor what was behind the chain link and the honest answer was usually a shrug: the West Course, closed, probably headed for something else eventually.
That fence came down in November 2025.
It Wasn't the Hurricane This Time
Most closures on this property trace back to one storm. Hurricane Maria tore through in 2017, and TPC Dorado Beach's East and Sugarcane courses spent months in recovery before reopening. The West Course's absence has a different, more recent cause. It closed in 2020, and the reason wasn't wind or flooding. Robert Trent Jones II, the golf architecture firm behind the recent work, has said plainly that real estate development affected several of its holes, and once play stopped, the rest of the course went overgrown from simple inactivity. For a stretch of years, some golf industry references described the West as effectively retired, its acreage flagged for residential use rather than golf.
That's what makes the reopening worth paying attention to. This wasn't a routine closure waiting out storm repairs. It was a course that had a real chance of never coming back at all.
The Same Firm, a Different Kind of Job
Robert Trent Jones II already had a track record on this property. About a decade before the West project, the firm restored the East Course, and RTJ II president Bruce Charlton has described that job as bringing the layout back to much of Robert Trent Jones Sr.'s original design, close enough that he calls it a Jones Sr. outdoor museum. The East and West were companions from the start. Jones Sr. laid out both in 1958, each a nine-hole course at first, and both were expanded to 18 holes in 1966.
The West couldn't get the same restoration treatment, because the ground underneath it wasn't the same ground anymore. With several original holes gone to development, Charlton's team, working with contractor Heritage Links, had to route a course through what was left rather than rebuild what used to be there.
"The West became overgrown due to inactivity, and when we got to work on it, we were very cognisant of where we were placing green complexes." — Bruce Charlton, president, Robert Trent Jones II
That's a careful way of saying the new routing had to work around missing land, not restore it. Golfers who played the old West before its closure remember a set of par-3s cut along the ocean, holes some considered tougher than the more famous par-3s on the East. Whether that stretch survived the new layout intact isn't something any source has confirmed. What's certain is that the course that reopened in November 2025 covers the same general footprint Jones Sr. staked out in 1958. It isn't tracing his exact lines through it anymore.
What's Still Closed, and Why the West Isn't a Preview
If the West Course could come back after this long, it's fair to wonder whether the Pineapple Course is next. It's the fourth original layout on the property, built in 1971 as part of the Plantation Club across the road from the Ritz-Carlton Reserve side, and it's been shut since Hurricane Maria damage in 2017. Golf industry references that tracked the West's closure alongside Pineapple's don't describe any comparable restoration underway there. The two closures had different causes, and so far, different outcomes. One got a redesign and a reopening date. The other has remained closed since 2017, with no similar project announced anywhere.
That distinction is worth holding onto if you plan a golf calendar around what might open next. The West's return isn't a sign the resort is working through a backlog of shuttered courses. It's a specific project, on a specific piece of land, with a specific set of reasons for happening now that don't automatically apply to Pineapple.
Meanwhile, the two courses already in the rotation carry their own pedigree, too. TPC Dorado Beach joined the TPC network in spring 2015, and the East Course hosted the PGA Tour Latinoamerica Tour Championship that same year, later named the top golf course in Puerto Rico by Golf Digest in 2016. The West rejoins a lineup that already had that kind of standing. It isn't starting from zero in terms of how the property positions its golf.
Getting On It Is Not the Same as Guests Getting On It
Here's the part that actually affects your Saturday morning. TPC Dorado Beach's own booking policy gives outside guests a six-month window to reserve tee times. Residents get three days. That gap applies across every course at the resort, not just the West, but it means something different now that a newly reopened, newly talked-about course is back in the rotation. A visiting member or hotel guest can lock in a tee time on the West Course for a trip planned half a year out. If you live here, you're working a three-day window, which means checking back regularly rather than planning a round the way you'd book a dinner reservation weeks in advance.
The resort has added a few ways to move around the new layout that didn't exist the last time the West was open. Golf board rentals, essentially a surfboard on wheels, are now available alongside the standard cart fleet. Caddies have also returned as part of the broader push toward the kind of service the property built its reputation on during the East Course restoration.
If you haven't walked the new West Course yet, the three-day booking window is the detail to plan around, not the six-month calendar a visiting guest gets to use. Check availability close to when you actually want to play. The course came back after a stretch where its acreage was genuinely being discussed for something other than golf, and the West's closure ran from 2020 to November 2025, while the Pineapple Course remains shut.
If you're weighing a home near the West Course, or wondering how a reopened amenity like this shows up in what buyers are willing to pay for a lot backing the fairway, Pelling Luxury Real Estate tracks changes like this as part of representing buyers and sellers across Dorado Beach. Reach out to request private listings and a home valuation.