El Camaleón is the résumé course. Greg Norman finished it in 2006, the PGA TOUR arrived in February 2007 for its first-ever event in Mexico, and the tour kept coming back through 2022 — sixteen editions in all. LIV Golf played it in 2023 and 2024, and in May 2025 it hosted the inaugural LPGA Riviera Maya Open, which returns in 2026. The chameleon in the name is the routing: jungle, mangrove, limestone canal, and then, twice in a round, the open Caribbean. There is a natural cenote beside the opening fairway, in case the point about geology needed making.
The rest of the coast is a study in architects. Robert von Hagge's 1994 design in the Playacar jungle — the former Golf Club at Playacar, now under the Hard Rock name — is the old-school test, all narrow doglegs and small greens under a canopy patrolled by coatis. Nick Price's Gran Coyote, formerly Grand Coral, threads jungle in Playa del Carmen and was built with an environmental team minding the water and wildlife around it. P.B. Dye's Iberostar Playa Paraíso, which co-hosted the 2016 World Amateur Team Championship alongside El Camaleón, is called one of his toughest by Iberostar itself, with small, undulating, heavily bunkered greens — recognizably a Dye. And Jack Nicklaus's Riviera Cancún, a Signature design from 2008, plays through mangroves and a natural reserve minutes from the Hotel Zone, its holes isolated from one another by wetland and long cart boardwalks.