Chiberta
Anglet, Nouvelle-Aquitaine
- Address104 Bd des Plages, 64600 Anglet, France
Chiberta is a monument to one of the world’s greatest architects, Tom Simpson, and it is also one of the few links courses on the French Atlantic coastline.
In the “Roaring Twenties”, 1926 to be precise, Tom Simpson was instructed by the golf mad Duke of Windsor to create the most beautiful course in the world. Simpson did a pretty good job. Chiberta is not quite Pebble Beach or Turnberry but it does have magnificent views across to the Biarritz lighthouse, which is sometimes the line from the 14th, a long dramatic par five adjacent to the seashore.
The following edited extract is from France’s Most Beautiful Courses by Jean-François Lefevre:
“Chiberta golf course’s golden age was in the 1930s. Its car park was crammed with long limousines whose chauffeurs gathered in a bar, specially made for them, to kill the long hours until their master would come back, their faces ruddy with sea-spray.
Then, a long period of decline set in and the fairways were overgrown with clover. Chiberta was in its death throes and lay forgotten until the 1970s, until, under the stewardship of Jean-Baptiste Ellisalde, the Anglet club determinedly embarked upon the long process of gradually winning back both the hearts of the golfers and the club’s former glory.
Today, in spite of a tiny clubhouse which some have no hesitation in finding ill-suited to such a marvellous course and a practice ground on the at the water’s edge inappropriate for training, Chiberta once more boasts a rude health. For in addition to having many members of its own, enough to make other French golf club managers pale with envy, it also welcomes visitors daily.”
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Tom Simpson spent only five years as a barrister before leaving behind the stifling offices at the Temple in London for a career as a golf course architect with Herbert Fowler in 1910.
