Highland Gate Golf & Trout Estate

This newish course (2011) is one of the most remote settings on this ranking, sitting in a mountain valley in the Drakensberg escarpment of Mpumalanga about a two-and-a-half hour drive from Johannesburg and Pretoria. The Ernie Els signature design opened embodies high-altitude golf, sitting around 2,000 meters above sea level, perhaps the highest-up of any of the courses on this list. Els compared the location to Scotland. “It reminds me of Gleneagles in the Highlands. The expansive views seem to go on forever.” There are three flyfishing dams on the estate, in an area known as South Africa’s premier flyfishing destination.