The steepest golf courses in France: elevation measured hole by hole

"Undulating course." That is what the brochure says, and that is all it says. Nobody publishes a figure, because nobody measures.

We measured. Here is the elevation of all 462 French 18-hole courses whose eighteen holes are surveyed, hole by hole, tee to green. Same scope as our anatomy of a French golf course and the length ranking.

What this ranking measures, and what it ignores

The measurement is the altitude difference between the tee and the green on each hole. The cumulative figure adds climbs and descents in absolute terms: a hole dropping 30 metres counts as much as one climbing 30, because both are walked.

What the measurement does not see is the walk from a green to the next tee. Those transfers are not surveyed. The figure published here is therefore in-play elevation — what you play, not what you walk. The real total for the day is higher, sometimes much higher, and the section on net balance below shows by how much.

That is a limit, it is real, and it is stated before the numbers rather than after.

The twenty steepest courses

#	In-play elevation	Climb	Descent	Course
1	357 m	+130	−227	UGolf d'Ammerschwihr, Alsace
2	353 m	+117	−236	Golf Méribel, Savoie
3	344 m	+141	−203	Golf du Lac de Tignes, Savoie
4	305 m	+159	−145	Montgenèvre, Chaberton
5	294 m	+108	−186	Blue Green Sainte-Maxime, Var
6	288 m	+108	−180	Golf Les Gets, Haute-Savoie
7	278 m	+116	−162	Domont Montmorency, Val-d'Oise
8	276 m	+144	−132	Albret Golf Expérience, Lot-et-Garonne
9	269 m	+98	−172	Bluegreen Saint-Étienne, Loire
10	263 m	+140	−123	Château de Bournel, Doubs
11	262 m	+125	−138	Corrençon en Vercors, Isère
12	260 m	+96	−164	Golf Club Saint-Tropez, Var
13	259 m	+46	−213	Gorges du Tarn, Lozère
14	251 m	+87	−163	Mont Saint-Jean, Saône-et-Loire
15	247 m	+104	−143	Clécy Cantelou, Calvados
16	244 m	+112	−131	Val de Sorne, Jura
17	242 m	+119	−122	Grand Nancy-Pulnoy, Meurthe-et-Moselle
18	241 m	+117	−124	Golf de la Plaine
19	240 m	+106	−134	Claux Amic, Alpes-Maritimes
20	238 m	+97	−141	Villeneuve-sur-Lot, Lot-et-Garonne

The French median is 89 metres. It takes more than 202 metres to enter the country's most vertical 10%, and Ammerschwihr posts 357 — four times the median.

The podium is Alpine, which is what you would expect. Less expected is Domont Montmorency in 7th, twenty kilometres from Paris, and Clécy in Normandy at 15th. You can play seriously hilly golf without leaving the Paris region.

The record holes

	Hole	Elevation	Course
Steepest descent	3	−84 m	Golf Méribel
	9	−77 m	Gorges du Tarn
	14	−68 m	UGolf d'Ammerschwihr
	13	−61 m	Blue Green Houlgate
Steepest climb	12	+49 m	UGolf d'Ammerschwihr
	10	+42 m	Clécy Cantelou
	17	+41 m	Golf du Lac de Tignes
	13	+37 m	Albret Golf Expérience

The asymmetry is immediate: France's longest drop is 84 metres, its longest climb 49. An architect will happily send a hole plunging; never send one climbing that far. A par 4 rising 84 metres would be unplayable.

Ammerschwihr holds both extremes on its own, and its profile explains the top spot:

+16 −21 +12 +18 −6 −19 −14 −17 −8 | −15 +20 +49 +4 −68 −30 +5 −28 +6

Holes 12 to 14 form the most brutal sequence in the country: climb 49 metres, take 4 more, then lose 68. A hundred and twenty-one metres of swing across three holes.

The figure the data cannot see

A golf course is a loop: it ends where it began. Its net balance should therefore be zero. It is not.

The French median net balance is −8 metres, and the extreme is spectacular: Golf des Gorges du Tarn finishes 167 metres lower than it starts. Its 9th is a 517-metre par 5 that drops 77 metres into the gorge.

Those 167 metres did not evaporate. They have to be climbed back — but between greens and the next tees, on walks the measurement does not survey. The net balance is therefore the arithmetic proof of what the ranking cannot see: at La Canourgue, the day includes at least 167 metres of invisible climbing on top of the 46 metres recorded in play.

It is also why this article says "in-play elevation" throughout and never "elevation walked". The two figures differ, and only the first is measured.

Almost one hole in two does not move

The ranking puts the mountains up front. The body of the distribution says the opposite.

Across the 8,316 measured holes, 3,964 change altitude by less than three metres — 47.7%. The median change per hole is 3.2 metres. You have to reach the 90th percentile to find 14 metres, and the 99th to pass 30.

Put plainly: half of French golf is played flat, and undulation is the business of a minority of holes on a minority of courses. A brochure promising an "undulating course" is statistically wrong one time in two.

The flattest courses

Eight French courses have no hole at all exceeding three metres of change, across all eighteen:

• 4 m — Golf Marmande, Lot-et-Garonne
• 7 m — Golf de Sant Cebrià, Pyrénées-Orientales
• 8 m — Val d'Amour, Jura
• 8 m — Golf Val-Grand, Seine-et-Marne
• 8 m — Blue Green Bordeaux Lac, Gironde
• 8 m — Blue Green Villeray, Yvelines
• 9 m — Blue Green Gujan, Gironde
• 9 m — Alsace Golf, Haut-Rhin

Marmande totals 4 metres of elevation across the entire course — less than the height of a fairway tree, and 353 metres less than Ammerschwihr. They are two different sports played with the same clubs.

Front nine or back nine: neither

You might expect architects to load one half more than the other — climb going out, come back down. They do not: 235 courses have a more vertical front nine, 227 a more vertical back. The gap is noise.

A null result, but a useful one: there is no French convention for distributing relief around a routing, unlike par, where the 1st and the 18th follow very clear rules.

Method

Source: the FlyAway production database, 17 August 2026. Scope: French courses not deleted, non-archived cards, grids of 18 par values totalling 68 or more, doubled nines excluded. Of the 469 courses retained, 462 have all eighteen holes surveyed — five have only part and two none; those seven are excluded rather than filled in by estimate.

Each hole's elevation is measured between the tee and the centre of the green. The cumulative figure is the sum of climbs plus the absolute value of descents; the net balance is their algebraic sum.

A plausibility check would remove any hole exceeding 100 metres of change. It had nothing to remove: the steepest hole in France is 84 metres, and all 8,316 values sit inside the expected range. It is the only one of our datasets that produced no anomaly at all.

This ranking is national. The regional reading — which regions genuinely make you climb, and by how much — needs a different method and gets its own article.

Every course cited has its own page, with card and hole-by-hole profile, in the French course directory.