nicaragua Hope Springs Eternal

     Nicaragua’s long-awaited real estate boom has so far been a bust, but golf development slowly continues in the impoverished Central American nation.
     Guacalito de la Isla, outside Rivas, recently opened its David McLay Kidd-designed golf course, golf construction is wrapping up at Montecristo Beach on the Costa Azul. In addition, Seaside Mariana in San Rafael del Sur hopes to start building its 18-hole, Nicklaus Design layout this year, although it’s been saying that for years.
     Now comes word that Milagro del Mar Beach & Golf Resort, which had to reorganize during the Great Recession, aims to resume golf construction, perhaps in 2013. The resort has already begun to build a few dozen condos, and it hopes to announce a hotel partner sometime soon.
     “We have weathered the storm,” the community’s developer, Roger Keeling, told the Nicaragua Dispatch late last year.
     Milagro del Mar is part of Gran Pacifica, a 2,500-acre spread in the village of San Diego, roughly an hour’s drive southwest of Managua, the nation’s capital city. The community has a nine-hole golf course designed by Tommy Haugen, and Keeling aims to build two more nines.
     Phil Alexander, the community’s vice president of sales and marketing, says that a new architect may be hired to design the forthcoming holes and to possibly redesign the existing track. “I would love to have a course as exciting as Kidd’s,” he says.
     Alexander won’t predict when construction will begin, but he believes that “the improvement and expansion of the golf course is a major part of the plan for developing our portion of the project.”  

     The original version of the preceding post first appeared in the January 2013 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.