Algarve Golf Economics: 1.46M Rounds, 38 Courses and the '70% of Portugal' Share That No Longer Holds

Two counts, one region

The regional series is the longer one. Turismo do Algarve and the Associação Turismo do Algarve (ATA) have released annual totals since at least the 2000s, compiled from courses registered with the regional golf association. The releases reach the public through local and national press: ECO, Postal do Algarve, Barlavento and Portugal Resident. None states how many courses reported in a given year, whether member and resident rounds are included, or how 9-hole rounds are counted.

On that basis, the Algarve passed one million rounds again in 2011, reached almost 1.2 million in 2015 and almost 1.3 million in 2016. A PwC study for ATA counted 1.341 million in 2017. Turismo do Algarve's presentation at the BTL trade fair in March 2024 gave 1.4 million for 2023, up 1% on 2022 and 3.4% on 2019. ECO reported 1.46 million for 2024 on 31 January 2025, up 5% and the highest on record. October was the busiest month with 179,000 rounds, followed by April with 162,000 and March with 153,000. Those three months alone held 33.8% of the year's play.

There are holes in the series. No annual total was found for 2020 or 2021, when the pandemic closed courses and grounded flights. The 2007 peak, the 2019 total and the 2022 total have to be back-calculated from growth rates published later, and are marked as derived in the table below. For 2025 there is no number at all. Turismo de Portugal's Snapshot Golfe 2025, published on 13 March 2026, says the Algarve "maintained leadership with a slight decrease in demand" and that the British market fell while remaining the largest. Our planning document carried "about 1.5 million rounds in 2025", attributed to a remark by the regional tourism president. No release or quote with that figure was found, and the official snapshot points the other way.

One more figure muddies 2024. TNEWS quoted the same tourism president on 13 March 2025 as saying the region passed 1.5 million rounds in 2024. That conflicts with the 1.46 million in Turismo do Algarve's own January release. The written release is the better evidence, and this article uses it.

The share of Portugal: from three-quarters to three-fifths

"The Algarve accounts for about 70% of golf in Portugal" is the most repeated line in English-language coverage, and it was in our own plan. It traces to the 2017 PwC study for ATA, which put national rounds at 1.8 million. Dividing 1.341 million by 1.8 million gives 74.5%. That was a fair description of 2017.

It is no longer one. The CNIG/EY-Parthenon census, published by Turismo de Portugal's TravelBI on 9 October 2024, gives the national 2023 total as 2,412,612 rounds and the regional split as Algarve 62%, Lisbon about 15%, Centro 9%, Norte 7%, Madeira 3%, Alentejo 2% and the Azores 1%. National rounds rose 12% between 2019 and 2023. The Algarve, on its own count, rose 3.4% over the same period.

Turismo do Algarve still uses higher figures. Its BTL 2024 presentation said the region plays "two-thirds" of national golf, and its president told Barlavento in March 2025 that the figure was 67%. Neither statement came with a national denominator. Dividing the regional 1.4 million for 2023 by the census total gives 58.0%, which mixes two course lists and should not be quoted either. The defensible wording is "about 62% of national rounds in 2023 (CNIG/EY)".

The direction is clear even if the bases are not. The rest of Portugal has added play faster than the Algarve has, while the Algarve's own count has edged up by 1% to 5% a year since 2019. The region is not shrinking. It is becoming a smaller part of a larger national market.

What the €4.2 billion measures

The EY-Parthenon study is the source of almost every national golf figure now in circulation. It was commissioned by CNIG and CTP, covers 2019 to 2023 and was presented to the press on 17 October 2024. The full report has not been published. Its figures reach the public through TravelBI's page "Impacto económico do golfe" and press summaries in Jornal Económico, Forbes Portugal, DNoticias and Barlavento.

Its headline is a total economic impact of €4.2 billion in 2023, up 57.4% on 2019. That number is real, but it is a gross measure. CNIG explained to DN in August 2024 that it includes golfers' spending on hotels, restaurants, car hire, transfers and retail. Golf's own contribution is far smaller: €603 million of gross value added and €120 million of direct GDP. The headline is 35 times the direct GDP figure. Some outlets describe the €4.2 billion as a cumulative 2019–2023 total. It is a single year.

The Algarve's slice of that direct contribution is €100 million, which TravelBI presents as part of the €120 million. On that reading the region generates 83% of golf's direct GDP while playing 62% of its rounds, which fits its higher green fees and foreign mix. Forbes Portugal reports the same €100 million as "revenue" and Barlavento as "over 60% of sector impact", so the label varies by outlet.

Jobs are where the bases collide most visibly. The study gives "more than 110,000" jobs and €2.2 billion in wages. In August 2024, two months before the study's release, CNIG told DN that golf supported 20,000 jobs. The 2017 PwC study gave 16,800 for the Algarve alone. The 110,000 counts employment supported by golfers' spending across the tourism economy. Nobody publishes a headcount of people employed by golf courses.

Two other studies are often added to the EY total and should not be. NOVA SBE's study for CNIG, presented at the Golf Business Conference in Funchal in November 2025, measured the residential-tourism and property effects of golf from 2014 to 2024: €69.14 million of production a year, 810 full-time jobs and a 19–20% price premium for property near a course. The PwC study for ATA measured Algarve golf tourism in 2017: €500 million of gross value added, €370 million of golfer spending and about €1,500 spent per golfer per trip. Each uses its own method, and none can be summed with another.

Green fees and revenue per round

Course revenue is better documented than course profit. The EY study gives average turnover of €2.2 million per course in 2023, up more than 40% on 2019, with green fees and driving ranges providing half of it. CNIG separately reported green-fee revenue of €154 million in 2022 and €160 million in 2023. Dividing €160 million by 2,412,612 rounds gives about €66 a round, a blended figure that includes members and residents.

Those numbers do not reconcile. Eighty-nine courses at €2.2 million each is about €196 million of turnover, and half of that is about €98 million of green and range fees, not €160 million. At least one of the published figures is defined differently from the way it is reported. Without the report, it is impossible to say which.

Rack rates are a different world. Booking aggregators listed 18-hole green fees in autumn 2026 at €223 for Quinta do Lago North, €220 for Monte Rei, €204 for San Lorenzo and €190 for the Royal at Vale do Lobo, against €45 to €90 at the region's value courses. No official body publishes an average green fee or a price index, so the 2026 range comes from a commercial source and is indicative only.

For the first half of 2025, the CNIG president told DN that revenue was up 10%. No absolute figure was given, and no full-year 2025 revenue has been published.

Who plays: the British half

Golf in the Algarve is an export industry. The EY study found that 74% of players nationally were foreign in 2023 and that club members played 31% of rounds, up from 27% in 2019. In the Algarve, British golfers played about 46% of rounds in 2023, followed by Swedes at 8%, Portuguese at 7%, Germans at 7% and Dutch at 3.5%. Forbes Portugal gives Sweden and Germany at 6% each and France at 4%, so the second tier depends on the outlet. Forbes also reported that the United States entered the top ten for the first time.

Older figures look more British. CNIG put British and Irish players at 65% of Algarve golf in 2022 and the PwC study at 73% of golf tourists in 2017, with 87% repeat visitors. Those are measured on different bases, foreign rounds in one case and surveyed tourists in the other, so the apparent fall from about 70% to 46% is not a reliable trend. What can be said is that Britain remains the largest market by a wide margin on every measure.

That dependence mirrors the region as a whole. ANA said British passengers made up 46% of Faro airport traffic in 2025. INE's Estatísticas do Turismo 2025, reported by ECO in July 2026, found that the Algarve's main foreign market supplied 34.4% of its non-resident nights and that the region took 57.3% of all British nights spent in Portugal. Our analysis of Portugal's US and Spanish markets shows how differently those two markets spread across regions. Americans spent 11.3% of their Portuguese nights in the Algarve in 2025, against 48.9% in Grande Lisboa.

Spending per golfer is modest compared with the marketing. The EY study, as published by TravelBI, puts daily spending by Algarve golfers at €156 for non-residents and €165 for residents over an average seven-day stay. The line that golf tourists spend "three to five times more" than other tourists traces only to an opinion piece by a Madeira club's board in DNoticias in May 2026, which cited €260 a day. INE publishes no current average-tourist daily spend for the Algarve to set against the EY figure, so the multiple cannot be tested and should not be repeated.

Golf as the Algarve's winter economy

The case for golf in the Algarve rests on the calendar. Eurostat's monthly accommodation data show 22,941,654 nights in the region in 2025, including campsites, down 0.18% on 2024. August held 3,707,472 of them and January 704,393. The peak month was 5.26 times the lowest. INE's final 2025 statistics give the Algarve a seasonality rate of 55.9%, the only region above 50%.

Golf runs on a different clock. Its national peak is October, when TravelBI recorded more than 3,300 rounds per course in 2024, and the Algarve's three busiest golf months in 2024 were October, April and March. Those months account for 9.5%, 8.6% and 5.5% of the region's nights. The six golf months, March to May and September to November, held 48.5% of Algarve nights in 2025.

The foreign share follows golf rather than beach. Non-residents spent 85.9% of Algarve nights in October 2025, 84.9% in May and 83.9% in March, against 59.4% in August, when Portuguese families fill the coast. Those are all foreign nights, not golf nights, and no source publishes golfer nights by month. The pattern is consistent with golf being a foreign, shoulder-season product, which is what courses and hoteliers say it is.

Faro airport shows the same tilt. Eurostat counts 10,349,949 passengers in 2025, 14.3% above 2019. October carried 10.7% of the year's traffic, more than its 9.5% share of registered nights, which suggests extra demand from second-home owners and golfers in accommodation INE does not count. The airport's peak-to-trough ratio of 4.37 is flatter than the nights ratio. In the first half of 2026 Faro handled 4.8 million passengers, up 3.8%, and the region's nights rose 1.8% in January to July.

A rough scale check is possible with the 2024 figures. The association's 1.46 million rounds against 22,983,590 nights works out to about 6.4 rounds per 100 nights across the year, and about 8.1 per 100 nights in October. These are derived ratios that include residents' and members' rounds, so they overstate visitor intensity. They still show that golf is a minority activity even in its peak month, and an important one for the hotels that stay open because of it.

The comparison with the rest of this series makes the point. Our Lisbon tourism statistics article covers a capital whose busiest month is about twice its quietest. Madeira's ratio is 1.67, and the island fills its quiet months with cruise ships, as our Madeira cruise analysis documents. The Algarve has neither Lisbon's city-break demand nor Madeira's subtropical winter to flatten its year that way. Golf is the counter-seasonal product it has.

Courses, owners and events

The course count depends on who is counting. The EY study gives 89 courses nationally in 2023, down from 93 in 2019, and 38 in the Algarve, 43% of the total. Turismo do Algarve's BTL 2024 presentation said "more than 40". Older press used 42 and 43, and VisitPortugal's page says "nearly forty", of which 33 have 18 or 27 holes. The water study behind a 2022 Polígrafo fact-check counted 41 irrigated courses in 2019. None of these comes with a public list. This article uses 38 because it is the most recent study figure.

On that count the Algarve averages about 38,400 rounds per course on the association's 2024 total, against about 27,100 per course nationally in 2023. Both are derived and mix sources, but the gap is large enough to survive the noise. Algarve courses are busier than the national average.

Ownership has concentrated. Arrow Global bought the Dom Pedro group's six hotels and five Vilamoura courses (Old Course, Pinhal, Laguna, Millennium and Victoria) in 2023 for an undisclosed price. Portugal Resident reported that it bought Palmares in Lagos for about €110 million later that year, a figure without official confirmation. In January 2025 Arrow notified the Competition Authority of its acquisition of Monte Rei, in the municipality of Vila Real de Santo António. That makes a single fund the owner of at least six Algarve courses, seven if the Palmares report holds, including Monte Rei, one of the region's highest-priced. No transaction price has been published for any of them.

Events have stayed on the same course. The Portugal Masters, a European Tour and later DP World Tour event, ran for 16 editions at Vilamoura from 2007 to 2022. Our research brief stated that it was last held in 2023, which is wrong. Portugal Resident reported that public support was "just over €500,000", a figure without an official source. In 2026 the same course, renamed The Els Club Vilamoura, hosted the Portugal Invitational, the first PGA TOUR Champions event in Europe, from 31 July to 2 August. Zach Johnson won the US$3 million event. Turismo de Portugal and Turismo do Algarve contribute €2 million a year under a five-year agreement running to 2030, and the tourism bodies estimate a "€45 million direct and indirect return" per edition with no published method. A later article in this series will examine that estimate.

Water: 6% of demand, first in line for cuts

Golf's water use draws more public scrutiny than any other part of the business. The best official baseline is the Agência Portuguesa do Ambiente's drought commission in Faro in November 2019, which put Algarve demand at 225 cubic hectometres a year: agriculture 135 (60%), public supply 71 (32%), golf 13 (6%) and other uses 6. A 2021 study on water efficiency at Portuguese courses, cited by Polígrafo in 2022, gave 14.6 hm³ in 2019 across 41 courses, about 357,000 m³ each, and 15.3 hm³ in 2020. Golf is about 6% of regional demand but about 19% of urban consumption, which is why both numbers appear in the debate.

The 2023–24 drought turned that into policy. The government's measures of 18 January 2024 cut urban supply 15% and tourism developments 25%. APA's vice-president said the target for golf irrigation was 18%. RCM 80/2024 of 21 June 2024 replaced the first regime: it cut tourism 13% against 2023, suspended public-network water for golf irrigation, capped golf's surface water at 1.7 hm³ and required treated wastewater wherever available. On 14 March 2025, with reservoirs recovering, cuts fell to a uniform 5% across sectors, and in July 2025 most groundwater restrictions were lifted. In January 2026 APA said every Algarve dam might need controlled discharges, which it called historic.

Treated wastewater is the long-term answer the sector chose. Águas do Algarve said in October 2023 that reuse would reach 8 hm³ by the end of 2025, 71% of it for golf, enough to irrigate about half the region's courses. In January 2024 only four courses used it, with 12 projected by 2027 and 32 by 2030. The Vilamoura reuse plant, opened on 8 July 2026 at a cost of €13 million to €14 million, supplies the five Arrow courses at up to 1,000 m³ an hour. No source confirms that the 2025 target was met. The Albufeira desalination plant, contracted in October 2024 for about €108 million and 16 hm³ a year, began works in April 2026 with completion now due in 2028.

Water is also where the Algarve's golf data is thinnest. No official golf water figure has been published since 2020, no count of courses on reclaimed water exists for 2025 or 2026, and no result against the 2024 golf target was released. A later article in this series covers the region's water stress in full.

The competition, measured where it can be

Benchmarking the Algarve is hard because its rivals publish even less. Andalucía has 109 courses, about 24% of Spain's, and an IE University study for the Spanish federation put Andalusian golf-tourism spending at €1.757 billion in 2024, but no round count exists for the region or for the Costa del Sol, which claims "over 70" courses and was IAGTO's Best European Golf Destination 2025. Murcia has 22 courses and pays €100,000 a year to its golf business association, with no round count.

The cleanest Spanish series is the Costa Blanca. Its course association reported more than 1.1 million rounds on 25 member courses in 2025, the fourth year above a million, with 54% played by visitors. That is about 44,000 rounds per course, more than the Algarve's derived 38,400. Belek in Türkiye reportedly reached about 600,000 rounds in 2025 on 16 to 18 courses, but every figure comes from resort managers quoted in the press. Morocco claims "more than 45" courses and publishes no round count.

On rounds, the Algarve remains the largest single golf destination in this group with a published number. On rounds per course, the Costa Blanca is busier, and on data transparency the Algarve is ahead only because the others publish almost nothing.

Ten claims tested

The panel below sets out the claims checked for this article. Four came from our own planning documents or research brief. The pattern repeats across this series: a figure that was accurate once is carried forward after the data behind it has changed.

What this means for travelers, businesses and analysts

Travelers. Golf in the Algarve peaks when the beaches empty: October, April and March were the busiest months in 2024. Tee times at the premium courses around Vilamoura, Quinta do Lago and Monte Rei are hardest to get then, and rack rates above €200 are normal; value courses charge €45 to €90. Winter, December to February, has the easiest tee times and the lowest hotel occupancy. Flights into Faro are fewest in January and February, so book early for those months. Water restrictions were eased to 5% in 2025, and in July 2026 every Algarve reservoir was at least 68% full.

Tourism businesses and investors. The Algarve's golf volume has grown about 1% to 5% a year since 2019 on its own count, while its share of national play has fallen to about 62%. The binding constraints are water and data. Irrigation depends on reclaimed water reaching the courses, a target already behind schedule, and on a desalination plant now due in 2028. Ownership is consolidating under Arrow Global, which also anchors the region's only international tour event. Anyone underwriting a course should ask for its own round and revenue history, because the public figures cannot be reconciled with each other: €2.2 million turnover per course and a €160 million green-fee total do not fit the same 89 courses. A published 2024 or 2025 national census, a rounds figure for 2025, or a return to drought restrictions would each change this assessment.

Journalists and analysts. Safe to cite: 1.46 million Algarve rounds in 2024 (Turismo do Algarve via ECO, association basis); 2,412,612 national rounds, 89 courses, 38 in the Algarve and a 62% Algarve share in 2023 (CNIG/CTP study by EY-Parthenon via TravelBI); €603 million GVA and €120 million direct GDP, of which the Algarve €100 million; golfers' daily spend of €156–165; golf at 13 hm³, 6% of Algarve water demand (APA, 2019); 22,941,654 Algarve nights in 2025 with an August-to-January ratio of 5.26 (Eurostat). Do not repeat: "70% of the national market" (2017 data), "1.5 million rounds in 2025" (no source), "over 40 courses" (no list), "World's Best Golf Destination" for the Algarve (a Portugal title from public voting), "three to five times the spending" (an opinion piece), or €4.2 billion and 110,000 jobs without stating that they count golfers' wider spending. This article adds a finding to the series' running tally of gaps: golf rounds are counted by a regional association with an unpublished method, and the only national census is a one-off study whose full report has never been released.