Featured Destination: Punta Cana Resort and Club

TravelGolf.com Staff Report

PUNTA CANA, Dominican Republic (MAY 10, 2001) - Punta Cana Resort and Club unveiled its new P.B. Dye-designed 18-hole golf course in January – a 7,152-yard layout featuring 14 holes with views of the Caribbean Sea.

The Punta Cana Golf Club course is the first championship-caliber layout in Punta Cana, a resort destination on the northeastern coast of the Dominican Republic that has become a fast-growing vacation destination.

It’s also Dye’s first solo effort in the Dominican Republic, where his father, Pete Dye, created the legendary Dientes del Perro, or "Teeth of the Dog," in 1971. As a teen-ager, Dye spent two summers helping his father build the course. Thirty years and 36 golf courses later, Dye returned to the Dominican Republic to design and build a beachfront course for Frank Rainieri, the Dominican businessman whose vision and hard work has made Punta Cana a popular vacation destination.

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In true Dye form, the Punta Cana Golf Club course is innovative, challenging, beautiful and fun. Four holes play directly along the Caribbean Sea.

Rather than using railroad ties to shore up greens (a tactic his father Pete is known to favor), Dye employed sections of palm trees soaked in seawater to make them impervious to rot. The tee markers are painted coconuts. Instead of the ubiquitous Bermuda grass, he chose Seashore Paspalum, an unusual turfgrass that not only can be irrigated with straight seawater, but requires half the normal amount of pesticides and fertilizers.

The Dye pot bunker is ever present, however. On hole No. 7, a dogleg left that plays directly into the tradewinds, Dye added 21 pot bunkers immediately before the small, elevated green.

He jokingly refers to this horrifying area as "Hecklebirnie," a type of golfer’s purgatory, according to Scottish lore.

Punta Cana Resort has created a special four-day, three-night Titanium Golf Package that includes unlimited golf, range balls and cart, golf clinic, accommodations in a new Golf Villa Grand Luxe, all meals and much more. The cost is $985 per person, based on double occupancy.

Punta Cana Resort and Club is situated on 15,000 tropical acres, just five minutes from the Punta Cana International Airport.

The property features 400 recently renovated hotel rooms and a variety of recreational activities, including golf, tennis, diving, fishing, horseback riding and sailing. The resort is surrounded by a nature preserve offering nature trails and pristine fresh water springs.

For reservations or information, call toll-free within the U.S. at 1-888-442-2262, or visit www.puntacana.com.

Content courtesy of the Punta Cana Resort and Club