Featuring an 18-hole championship course, a 149-room 5-star Pullman hotel, 4,900 m2 spa, extensive event facilities and a luxury residential development, the Bulgarian resort of OKOL Lake Park is set to raise the bar for golf and hospitality in the Balkan region when it opens in 2023.
Located 30km south east of Sofia, the resort is surrounded by beautiful natural landscapes, the centrepiece of which will be a championship golf course designed by European Golf Design that will be playable by all levels of golfer, although capable of hosting national and international tournaments.
The golf side of the business, including the pre-opening and day-to-day golf operations, are being managed by IMG, and the resort will become part of the IMG Prestige Network when it opens next year.
Other golf facilities at OKOL will include a golf academy featuring IMG Performance Studios that offer the latest in swing analysis and custom-fitting technology.
Construction of the course first began in the autumn of 2020, with Robin Hiseman, architect at European Golf Design, leading up the project. He said: “In a developing golf market like Bulgaria, and in the specific example of a golf resort like OKOL Lake Park, we’ve sought to design a course that will encourage new players to try the game and to stick with it as they improve. We don’t want the course to be so difficult that novice golfers are discouraged, but we also need to ensure that they find that the strategic challenge of the course maintains their interest. There are layers to the design, which reveal themselves to the players in different ways depending on ability.”
He added: “OKOL is lightly bunkered off the tee, so the player will be able to keep the ball moving forward quite easily, but if you are chasing a par score, you’re going to find the green complexes technically challenging. There are several holes with no bunkers at all, because the natural features do the work for us. We’ve made sure there are plenty of different tees to choose from and now that gender is no longer a determining factor of which tee you play, we trust golfers will seek out the ones best suited to their ability. They’ll enjoy it a lot more if they do.”
To watch of video of recent progress of the development of the resort, click here.