CAPE TOWN ACTIVITIES
Golf Courses You Can Play in Cape Town
Most golf writing about this city assumes you are already a member somewhere. This guide does not: eight courses whose own records say they are open to visitors, from the Green Point Common to the far side of the whale coast.
Metropolitan Golf Club
The closest thing Cape Town has to city-centre golf, laid out on the Green Point Common between the stadium, Signal Hill and the Mouille Point lighthouse. If you have half a day between other plans and no car, this is the round that fits. It takes bookings by phone or email rather than online, so give it a day of notice.
The layout is unusual and worth understanding before you book. There are nine fairways and fourteen greens, played off separate tees to produce a full eighteen-hole card, and the club prices both nine and eighteen-hole rounds. In its own words the course belies its nine-hole status and plays very much like an eighteen-hole layout.
There is no online tee sheet. Bookings go through the club’s bookings line or email, so do not look for a booking button.
King David Mowbray Golf Club
A mature par-72 parkland roughly fifteen minutes from the city centre, with Table Mountain and Devil’s Peak standing over it. It is the middle option for a visitor: close enough to reach easily, long enough to feel like a proper round rather than a squeezed-in nine.
King David Mowbray Golf Club welcomes visitors seven days a week and links directly to an online tee sheet where available rounds can be booked.
The club also publishes member-priority periods for Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons and Saturdays. Visitor times may be released the day before or on the day when space is available, so check the live tee sheet before planning around those periods.
Royal Cape Golf Club
Established in 1885 and, by its own account, Africa’s oldest championship golf club. It is a flat, tree-lined parkland in Wynberg, which means it is walkable and welcoming rather than punishing, and it takes online tee-time bookings. If the history is the reason you are playing golf on this trip, start here.
Royal Cape provides a public visitor tee sheet alongside a separate members’ login. If the tee sheet shows no times or returns an error, contact reception.
Clovelly Golf Club
Clovelly sits in the Silvermine valley behind Fish Hoek, reached down a narrow suburban road that gives away nothing about what is at the end of it. It is the surprise on this list, and worth building a day around if you are already heading down the peninsula.
The club provides an official online visitor booking page. It states that the displayed and processed green fee is the non-affiliated visitor rate and that completed online payments are final and non-adjustable.
The club does not publish a blanket weekend visitor rule on its visitor booking or rates pages. Check the live booking page or contact the bookings team before planning a Saturday or Sunday round, because availability can vary.
Simon’s Town Country Club
On the slopes above False Bay in the naval town at the end of the peninsula, about forty-five minutes from the centre. It is a links-style course with the sea below it, and it books by phone or email. Pair it with the rest of the peninsula rather than treating it as a standalone drive.
The layout is nine greens with alternate tees, numbered 1 and 10, 2 and 11 and so on, played twice for a full eighteen at par 66. The club publishes both nine and eighteen-hole rates, so a short round is a proper option here rather than an afterthought.
There is no online tee sheet. Tee times are booked by phoning the club or calling in at the pro shop, and the club states that walk-ins are welcome subject to availability, which is unusual in Cape Town. It advises booking ahead for weekends and public holidays.
Strand Golf Club
Between the Hottentots-Holland range and the sand of False Bay, and it describes itself as striving to be the friendliest club in the country. For a visiting golfer without a network here, a club that says that about itself is worth taking at its word. Tee times are bookable online.
The club runs a public visitor tee sheet from its own site, showing a fortnight of dates and rates with no account needed. There is also a find and pay tab for retrieving a booking you have already made.
One thing to know before you look: the rate card is published only as a picture, with no readable text behind it, so it will not scale or read aloud on a phone. Open the fees page on a larger screen before you travel.
Arabella Golf Course
On the edge of the Bot River lagoon under the fynbos slopes of the Kogelberg, on the R44 near Kleinmond. This is the destination round on the list: you do not fit it around a morning in the city, you drive out for it, and the setting is the reason.
This is a resort course rather than a members’ club, and booking is straightforward: tee times go online up to a year ahead. The one thing to know before you click is that full pre-payment is required to secure a booking, and cancelling inside forty eight hours forfeits the whole fee.
The club also publishes dated closures. The course is unavailable for hollow tining from 28 September to 2 October 2026, 3 to 7 May 2027, and 27 September to 1 October 2027, which is worth checking against an early spring or early winter trip.
Hermanus Golf Club
Twenty-seven holes on the Cape South Coast, in a town the club calls a picturesque fishing village and everyone else knows for whales. If you are already going to Hermanus in season, the extra nine holes make it the one course here where you can genuinely choose the length of your round.
Hermanus has twenty-seven holes rather than eighteen, arranged as three separate eighteen-hole courses. The club names the combinations by hole number: East is holes 1 to 18, North is 19 to 27 followed by 1 to 9, and South is 10 to 18 followed by 19 to 27. Each plays to a par of 72 and each has its own scorecard and handicap conversion table.
What the club does not publish is which combination is in play on a given day, so ask when you book. And between 15 December and 15 January bookings are strictly telephonic and must be made seven days in advance.
Booking, and what open to visitors actually means
Every course in this guide records itself as open to visitors, which is not the same as walk-on. Half of them take online tee times; the rest work by phone or email, and a day or two of notice is the difference between a round and a polite no. Book before you drive, particularly at the weekend.
Four of the courses are inside forty minutes of the city centre and three are day trips along the coast. If time is short, the Metropolitan and King David Mowbray are the two that fit around other plans. If the golf is the point of the day, Arabella and Hermanus are worth the drive.