Pablo Morán was the course’s first greenkeeper. He saw it come to life, survived a crisis, a pandemic and a change of ownership alongside it — and today, with T Club’s investment, sees it at its very best.
Some courses are inherited, and some are built from scratch, step by step. This one belongs to the latter. Pablo Morán arrived in 2005 to sow a terrain that was still being shaped, and twenty years later he remains the living memory of a project that has weathered crisis, pandemic and a change of ownership to reach its best moment yet.
01 — The origin: From seeding to legend
“I was hired to come for the seeding of the course, while the fine shaping of the holes was still underway,” he recalls. “As I seeded, I was hiring people along the way: that’s how I started building the team that, over the years, has become the one I have today.”
He saw the 2008 crisis force staff cuts, and weathered COVID with just three people responsible for sixty-five hectares. He considered leaving more than once. He stayed, he says, because he always believed in what this course could become.
“Everyone was locked indoors, no one could go out, and I was in charge of maintaining sixty-five hectares of natural space. I remember it as a time of privilege.” — Pablo Morán, on the lockdown
02 — The investment: The T Club stamp, hole by hole
With the arrival of T Club, the course entered an unprecedented investment phase: new machinery with hybrid engines, solar panels covering almost all daytime consumption, AI-assisted precision irrigation that outperforms the old system by minutes, and endotherapy to treat the most sensitive pines along the course.
This year, the purchase of the machinery fleet the project had long been waiting for was also finalised. After several phases focused on other priorities, it was now the machinery’s turn — to bring it up to the level of everything else.
“This course, with just a little investment and care, shines right away. It’s a great design, well built; it just needed financial support and a renovation to bring it back to where it once was.” — Pablo Morán
For Morán, the T Club stamp can be summed up in one word he repeats often: support. The very thing, he says, that was missing from a course that already had everything else.
03 — The terrain: A course known hole by hole
Twenty years is enough time to know every fold of the terrain. If he had to pick one hole, it would be the fifteenth: “It only needs one bunker and a small front green to be challenging, but seen from the tees, with the lake full, it’s a hole I love to look at.” Then there are the quiet corners, like the woods by the thirteenth hole, where he sometimes pauses for a moment during his morning round to listen to the birds.
From these twenty years, one anecdote stands out above all others: the day one of his workers, Vladimir, dropped a machine into the lake by the sixteenth hole. “I had never seen him so pale. In the end, I jumped into the lake in my underwear to give him a hand, and between members and staff, we pulled it out with a tractor.”
04 — The surroundings: A living ecosystem
With no houses or buildings nearby, and surrounded by private hunting reserves, the course has become a wildlife refuge. “It’s an ecosystem of sixty-five hectares,” says Morán, a biologist by training, “where, besides people coming to play golf, there is a lot of flora and fauna that makes it much richer.”
05 — The present: The course, at its best
When he talks with members, something he does often to take their pulse, the response is always the same: they say it has been worth it, that the course has improved a great deal, that they appreciate the playing conditions and how the clubhouse has turned out. And since they can see the project is ongoing, that it doesn’t stop here, they experience it with excitement.
06 — The legacy: “Without my team, I am nothing”
Twenty years — twenty-one, in fact — after sowing the first greens, Morán doesn’t speak of himself when he thinks about the course’s future. He speaks of his team.
“This is entirely a team effort, and I’m very proud of them. If my team remembers me as demanding but fair, that’s enough for me.” — Pablo Morán
