Situated on the foothills of El Avila Mountain, this country club was established in 1918 by William Phelps as the Caracas Golf Club. During the late 1920s, on the advice of Nelson Rockefeller, the Olmsted Brothers firm was engaged to design a surrounding residential community on the lands of several former coffee plantations. The firm used a sensitive approach that both protected and incorporated pre-existing landscape features. Collaborating with golf course architect Charles Banks, James Dawson, and Leon Zach of Olmsted Brothers expanded the original golf course to the north and south in order to maintain wide vistas of lush mountainous terrain. The 92-acre residential community was laid out to conserve large groves of mango, pink bucare, mijo, and palm trees that once forested the region. Originally designed by architect Clifford Wendehack and expanded in the 1950s, the clubhouse was situated on the foundations of the former hacienda in order to maintain the estate’s tree-lined, central drive (since renamed Calle El Valle) as the main thoroughfare. Olmsted Brothers ensured other historically significant features were also preserved, including an eighteenth-century bridge spanning the Chacaíto Creek near the hacienda. The eighteen-hole golf course, built in two stages in 1930 and 1934, measures some 6,600 yards, with stepped greens that follow the natural topography. The course is framed by woodlands preserved by Olmsted Brothers, with additional tree groves interspersed among the fairways alongside irregularly shaped sand traps. The Calle El Valle, lined with Washington filifera palms, bisects the country club. Laid out in the Garden City style the surrounding planned community is interwoven with a curvilinear street pattern set among long stretches of greensward planted with masses of specimen trees.
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Venezuela
