For all those who don’t crave the too-familiar golf resort with its Ben Hogan hamburgers and squealing bagpipes, consider this serene tribal-owned sanctuary north of mile-high Albuquerque on the banks of the Rio Grande.
Sitting on 500 acres that Coronado’s occupying forces (including slaves) held around 1540, the adobe-style Hyatt Tamaya Resort & Spa is the understated showpiece of the Santa Ana Pueblo, one of 23 distinct Native American communities or reservations in New Mexico.
Though the once-mighty Rio Grande has been sapped so well by drought and big agriculture that you can often cross it here with little more than hiking boots, the forested banks, or bosque, remain a fertile marvel choked with giant cottonwoods that in the fall form a radiant golden ribbon running some 470 miles south to El Paso. Hovering over the bosque to the east are the imposing Sandia Mountains, whose pinkish granite face is nearly 1.4 billion years old and rises to nearly 11,000 feet.
That’s the backdrop for 350 pueblo-style guestrooms, three outdoor pools, the spa, fine dining, horse stables and two exceptional golf courses – Twin Warriors and Santa Ana — that have hosted scores of national junior, senior, women’s, collegiate and PGA club pro tournaments while still remaining fun and challenging for a wide range of golfers.
“During the 2022 Senior PGA Professional Championship,” recalls Cory Armstrong, executive director of the Sun Country Golf House, “I heard a lot of guys saying this was their first time in New Mexico and that the Tamaya and its two courses were not just a cookie-cutter resort. You get exposed to the native culture, from the flute music and cedar incense in the lobby to the pottery and art…It’s not just golf photos everywhere.”
“We don’t really call it a golf resort,” Tamaya general manager and Hyatt veteran Claudia Wattenberg confesses. “So many people come for the spa, the horses, just the nature that surrounds us, and some never play golf.”
We will keep them in our prayers.
The original Santa Ana course, a 27-hole links-style complex opened in 1991, was designed by Ken Killian and former PGA Tour professional Ken Green. From its early days of high desert solitude, when it was one of the few tribal-owned courses in the nation and the Hyatt hotel and nearby garish casino had not arrived, the Santa Ana nines have matured into challenging but not brutal rater-seducing golf. You get a lot of grassed mounding, full fairways and regal cottonwoods, yet with fewer of the forced carries and stunning elevation changes of its younger sister course just a mile away.
A typical evening round on this hybrid parkland-high desert course – it’s not Scottsdale target golf — might include chubby roadrunners darting through the cactus, Cooper’s hawks soaring overhead and barking coyotes warming up for their nighttime hunts. Always popular in the Albuquerque market, Santa Ana ($30 – $70) is a restful,
walkable experience with superb greens and a lower lost-ball anxiety factor that will attract the multi-skilled family on vacation or an avid traveling foursome.
But just up the hill by hotel shuttle, a thrill awaits.
When the Gary Panks-designed Twin Warriors opened in 2001, Albuquerque was still enjoying its moment in the golf rater sun one year after brand new Paako Ridge Golf Club, some 46 miles east on the backside of the Sandias, began raking in national awards. Together, the two courses put the engaging city of Albuquerque on a largely overlooked golf map, which also features quality tracks at the University of New Mexico Championship Course, and the tribal-owned Cochiti Golf Club, Sandia Golf Club and Isleta Golf Club, plus popular muny courses in town.
But as Paako’s recent $225 green fee put it beyond the means of many middle class golfers, Twin Warriors emerged as a reasonable splurge, a unique golf destination attached to one of the Southwest’s smartest, most nature-conscious hotels. And as more distant travelers discovered Twin and the Albuquerque market, more also realized that the best courses in New Mexico, with its four-season, low-humidity climate, are often $100 to $200 cheaper than a similar daily-fee bonanza in over-crowded, scorched Scottsdale.
The Twin Warriors experience (about $155, cheaper for NM residents) really starts before you even reach the parking lot. To reach the hotel or golf course from the outside world, you meander down a smooth one-lane road surrounded by desert that might have you thinking, especially at night, that you’ve taken a wrong turn.
“It’s like a stress-relieving decompression zone,” observes Derek Gutierrez, the resort’s director of golf and an employee since 1996. “It’s not meant to be an imposing complex. It’s designed to blend in with the landscape.” But that doesn’t mean you personally need to blend with the desert. Before you reach the first tee of Twin Warriors, a veteran starter who was here when everything was cactus and chamisa will calmly tell you that there are, of course, rattlesnakes in the thorny desert. Seriously. Do not go trotting into the rough reaching for your lost orb, especially in the morning when snakes warm themselves.
Forewarned and perhaps full from an incendiary, green chile breakfast burrito, Twin’s canvas of solid scenic golf holes (slope 136 from the resort tees) gently unfolds from an opening par-five. Number four is a 197-yard, par-three with a forced carry over a pond to a green bordered by landscaped waterfalls, but a dozen more impressive holes await, including several that are bordered by caves that have cultural significance in the Tamayame culture.
If you can focus on the golf holes more than the natural scenery, you’ll appreciate Twin’s multiple approaches to its bentgrass greens, ample driving corridors, nice risk-reward carries that aren’t suicidal and a smart use of natural arroyos rather than man-made ponds. Returning fans will appreciate fewer but improved better-draining bunkers. Unlike many target-golf desert courses, you can run the ball up on several Twin holes and if you are annoyingly skilled there are back tees at 7,700 yards, slope 140. Remember, at more than a mile high, your missiles could travel six-to-nine percent farther than at sea level.
Twin’s critics sometimes say that first timers, meaning plenty of tourists, are flummoxed by a hidden arroyo crossing the number one fairway – I’ve been there – and a
few blind or somewhat obscured landing areas. Fair enough. They say the same thing about Ireland’s Royal County Down, which has no burritos.
There are plenty of other features that have kept me returning to the Tamaya:
Both courses have excellent practice areas, and Santa Ana has a fantastic barrel of one-dollar barely-used golf balls. Hyatt also offers Twin Warriors golf packages. Call them for pricing. Santa Ana has a great café but also a legitimate fine dining restaurant, the Prairie Star ($30 – $70), serving stuff like grilled local bison, pan roasted Alaskan halibut and cherry cobbler for dessert. (With that said, a can’t-miss New Mexico favorite, The Range Café, is just five miles away in Bernalillo. Open 7:30 am to 8:30 pm.)
The Tamaya does sustainability nicely. They have a bosque restoration program, 30 different kinds of herbs and vegetables are harvested from on-site gardens, four kinds of fruit are grown in their orchard, 20,000 local honeybees produced four gallons of honey in 2024, and the hotel donated more than 3,000 pounds of food last year to an Albuquerque homeless shelter. The Tamaya also runs a horse rehabilitation program that provides veterinary care, training and shelter, along with horseback riding along the Rio Grande.
The hotel is 17 miles north of Albuquerque – a perfect golf trip HQ — so you are just that much closer to the invigorating Cochiti Golf Club (44 minutes) and the fancy charms of Santa Fe (one hour), including one of America’s best muny courses, the Marty Sanchez Links. Your other must-play is the University of New Mexico’s Championship Course, a tight demanding track that is literally 90 seconds from the rental car parking lot at the Albuquerque airport. Tiger Woods won his first college golf tournament there in 1994.
The Tamaya has separate adult and kid swimming pools, and best of all – this should have been the headline — it is a dog-friendly woofing oasis and the well-maintained miles of tree-lined trails next to the resort are some of the best jogging/dog trails you’ll ever find at a vacation destination that doesn’t really call itself a golf resort. Which is fine by us.
Texas resident Bruce Selcraig, a former Sports Illustrated staff writer, has written about New Mexico for over 40 years for The New York Times, Smithsonian and The Irish Times. selcraig@swbell.net