The most bunkered golf courses in France: 88 at the top, 1 at the bottom

How many bunkers are there on your course? Nobody knows, the club included. The figure is written down nowhere, and eyeballing it fails badly: you remember the bunkers you have been in.

They are traced all the same, one by one, as polygons. Here is the count.

Why this ranking covers only 217 courses

This has to come first, because it is what separates a defensible figure from a wrong one.

Hazards are traced per club, not per scorecard. A 27-hole club offering three 18-hole combinations shows the same bunker on several cards; its hazards are surveyed once for the whole site. Counting its bunkers "per 18 holes" therefore divides a 27-hole total by 18, which inflates the result mechanically.

Of France's 709 courses, 250 expose more than one card and are excluded for that reason. That leaves 246 with a single 18-hole card; of those, 217 carry exactly 18 traced greens, confirming the survey covers one course and one only.

That is this article's perimeter. It is narrow — under a third of the country — but every one of its 217 counts is exact, which a full national ranking would not have been.

How a bunker is counted

Three rules, and each one changes the answer.

Only surveyed tracings count. Community contributions and manual additions exist on a handful of courses: including them would rank a course higher for having been edited, not for holding more sand.

Type other is excluded. It holds tee areas and playing-area envelopes — service geometry, not hazards. In France it accounts for 43,449 polygons out of 92,671, close to half the raw total.

A bunker is a polygon, not a point. Each carries its computed surface, which allows bunkers to be counted and sand to be measured separately — and the two rankings do not look alike.

These three rules govern all our hazard counts, including the greens and water that follow.

The fifteen most bunkered courses

#	Bunkers	Sand	Average size	Course	Built
1	88	7,332 m²	83 m²	Fontainebleau	1909
2	84	9,228 m²	110 m²	Golf International de Grenoble	1921
3	83	9,521 m²	115 m²	Makila Golf Club	1993
4	82	3,121 m²	38 m²	Golf de Biarritz	1888
5	80	3,978 m²	50 m²	Dinard Golf	1887
6	76	11,467 m²	151 m²	Bluegreen Niort	1984
7	75	6,448 m²	86 m²	Golf Thumeries	1932
8	75	9,934 m²	132 m²	Golf Val-Grand	1991
9	74	10,043 m²	136 m²	Gaia Orléans-Limère	1992
10	72	8,782 m²	122 m²	Bossey	1985
11	72	12,563 m²	174 m²	Château de Cheverny	1988
12	71	4,555 m²	64 m²	Golf de Spérone	1990
13	71	6,194 m²	87 m²	Golf de Saint-Cloud	1913
14	70	11,159 m²	159 m²	Domaine de Vaugouard	1987
15	69	7,348 m²	106 m²	Château de la Chouette	1998

The French median is 43 bunkers, barely more than one per hole and a half. Fontainebleau therefore carries twice the typical course, averaging five per hole across its eighteen.

Now compare the "bunkers" and "sand" columns. Biarritz is 4th by count and last in the top 15 by surface: 82 bunkers for 3,121 m², or 38 m² each. Cheverny is 11th by count and first by surface: 72 bunkers for 12,563 m², 174 m² each. These two courses do not offer the same game, and a ranking that counted only bunkers would call them equivalent.

Sand does not make difficulty

This is the result that surprises most, and it leaves no room for doubt.

The correlation between bunker count and slope is r = −0.006. Zero. A course riddled with sand is rated no harder than one with almost none.

With length the link exists but stays weak: r = 0.258. Longer courses hold slightly more bunkers, which the available acreage explains better than any intent.

The contrast with our other measures is stark. Length explains half of difficulty (r = 0.53); elevation shapes the whole country. Sand predicts nothing. It is an aesthetic choice and a maintenance cost before it is a defence — and the official raters confirm it without saying so.

Many small, or few large

Eras do not bunker the same way, but the trend is weaker than it looks.

Era	Courses	Bunkers	Average size
before 1940	28	52.1	98 m²
1940-1979	36	43.9	101 m²
1980-1989	77	40.3	110 m²
1990-1999	62	40.2	118 m²
2000 onward	10	43.0	130 m²

The direction holds throughout: recent courses carry fewer bunkers, but bigger ones. Total sand barely moves — between roughly 4,500 and 5,300 m² in every era.

Honesty about the strength of that signal is required, though: the correlations are 0.21 between year and average size and −0.24 between year and count. A tendency, not a law, and it explains only a small share of the variation.

The named extremes carry it far better. Biarritz (1888) and Dinard (1887) line up 82 and 80 bunkers of 38 and 50 m² — deep pots, inherited from links golf. Cheverny (1988) and Vaugouard (1987) lay out 72 and 70 of 174 and 159 m² — expanses shaped by excavator. A century separates two ideas of the same hazard.

France's twenty-seven giant bunkers

Across the 9,164 bunkers in the perimeter, the median is 88 m² — small enough to fit in a double garage. The largest 10% exceed 205 m², the top percentile 457.

And twenty-seven French polygons pass 1,000 m², three of them clearing 3,000:

• 4,324 m² — Golf Disneyland
• 3,441 m² — Le Kempferhof
• 3,296 m² — Paris International

At that size the word "bunker" no longer fits: these are sand areas, which modern architecture lays along a hole as landscape rather than as a point trap. They are not tracing errors — vertex count rises steadily with surface, from 19 on a small bunker to 113 on these giants, which indicates a fine survey rather than a rough blob.

The courses without sand

At the other end, eight French courses live almost without a bunker:

• 1 bunker — GIGA Golf Club, Corsica
• 2 — Golf Club de L'Ariège
• 8 — Golf de Teynac
• 10 — Golf Du Luberon
• 12 — Golf d'Avrainville

One bunker across eighteen holes is a position as much as an economy: bunkers are expensive to maintain, and a course that does without defends itself another way — through relief, water or narrowness.

Method

Source: the FlyAway production database, 17 August 2026. Hazards drawn from the surveyed tracings, not archived, type bunker, excluding community contributions and manual additions. Scope: French courses not deleted, with a single 18-hole card that is not a doubled nine and carries a par of 68 or more, and exactly 18 traced greens — 217 courses, 9,164 bunkers.

The detected_from_hole field reads zero on all 22,414 French bunkers: it is never populated for this hazard type, and no per-hole conclusion is drawn from it here.

Surfaces are computed from the traced polygons. No plausibility check had anything to remove: the 27 polygons above 1,000 m² are real sand areas, not artefacts.

Every course named has its own page in the French course directory.