Costa Blanca

If the Costa del Sol is where Spanish golf goes to be photographed, the Costa Blanca is where it goes to be played. An hour south of Alicante airport, half a dozen courses sit within thirty minutes of one another, and a four-round week here costs noticeably less than the same week two hundred kilometres west.

The ground is flatter, and that changes the week more than it sounds: most of these courses are genuinely walkable, and a buggy is a choice rather than a requirement. Las Colinas is the one that draws people here — a par 71 laid through a 330-hectare valley facing the sea, consistently in Spain's top rankings, with a short-game area designed by Miguel Ángel Jiménez. La Finca and Real Club Campoamor make up the rest of a strong southern cluster.

Further north, around Benidorm and Dénia, the picture changes: fewer courses, further apart, and a different kind of holiday around them. If the group wants golf every day, stay south. If half the party wants a town with an evening in it, the north is the compromise.

The honest part: this is not scenery country. Several courses run through housing developments and the view is of white villas rather than mountains, which bothers some golfers and not others at all. What you get instead is one of the driest, sunniest corners of Europe — playable every month, properly warm from March, and genuinely quiet from November to February, when green fees fall to a level the Costa del Sol never reaches.