argentina El Desafio Golf Club

This year, one of the richest people in the United States plans to start building the first Greg Norman-designed golf course in South America.

Norman’s 18-hole course will serve as a drawing card for El Desafio, a 2,500-acre resort community that’s taking shape in San Martin de los Andes, in the Patagonia region of southern Argentina. At build-out, El Desafio will have a bunch of houses, a hotel with the obligatory spa, an equestrian center, a pair of professional polo fields, and other attractions favored by the well-heeled. More than half of the property, which offers views of the Andes Mountains, will be preserved as open space.

El Desafio is being developed by Hicks Trans American Partners LLC, an entity created by Tom Hicks, the principal of Dallas, Texas-based Hicks Holdings LLC and a long-time member of the Forbes 400. Hicks Holdings has its fingers in a lot of investment pies -– satellite television, steelmaking, real estate development –- but it’s perhaps best known for its sports franchises, which include the Dallas Stars of the National Hockey League and the Liverpool Football Club in the English Premier League. It also owns baseball’s Texas Rangers, although the team is in the process of being sold, reportedly for a price just north of $500 million.

Hicks Trans American Partners, which is based in Buenos Aires, is the controlling shareholder of Argentina’s top pet-food company, but it’s mostly a real estate developer. It's developing El Desafio as a 50-50 joint venture with Terra Patagonia, an Argentine developer. The partners cleared much of the golf-course site in 2009, and they expect to begin moving dirt later this year.

Norman has two projects in the works in Brazil (in Sao Paulo and Fortim), but the course at El Desafio is expected to come out of the ground first.

ElDesafioMountainResort.com, HicksHoldings.com