Valle de los Encinos

Valle de los Encinos occupies roughly 8,000 hectares of high-desert ranchland in Chihuahua, north-central Mexico, on the former Agua Caliente ranch about thirty minutes from Chihuahua city along the Ciudad Juárez highway. The masterplan is organised around an 18-hole championship golf course routed through the valley floor and its oak-studded ridgelines, co-designed by Agustín Pizá of Pizá Golf and Chad Goetz of Nicklaus Design. It is the Nicklaus office's twenty-sixth championship layout in Mexico and its first in the country's central highlands. The course is conceived as a semi-private club that opens to the public through an on-site boutique hotel, pairing country-club refinement with the width and playability of a destination resort layout. Around it sits a working vineyard and winery, an equestrian club, a spa, a sports club with pool, tennis, padel and football pitches, a shooting range, hiking and mountain-bike trails, a chapel, a museum, and a hacienda-style event pavilion built for weddings, concerts and conventions. Residential lots and homes are woven into the landscape by Artigas Arquitectos, and a large share of the property is held back as an ecological reserve, leaving the oak groves and seasonal watercourses that give the valley its name largely intact.