Pueblo Santa Ana’s golf resort, Towa, was built on land the tribe owns outright — which means the greens fees help fund an actual sovereign nation. That fact tends to get buried under talk about the views, which, fair enough, are absurd.
Rick Montoya has been caddying and later working the pro shop at Towa Golf Resort since 2003. He grew up in Bernalillo, ten minutes down the road, and says he applied for the job mostly because he needed work and someone told him the course was nice. He didn’t expect to stay. “I’ve seen people drive up, look at the Sandias, and just sit in their cars for a while before they even get out,” he says. “I get it. I still get it.”
Towa sits about eighteen miles north of Albuquerque proper, just off Highway 550 near the town of Bernalillo. The course was designed by Hale Irwin and William Phillips and opened in 2000. It plays 7,737 yards from the tips — a number that gets your attention — spread across two nines that feel genuinely different from each other. The front nine is more open, flirting with the Rio Grande bosque. The back nine climbs into the high desert, and by the time you reach the 18th tee, you’re looking at a panorama of the Jemez Mountains to the west and the Sandias to the east. People have been known to lose strokes standing there with their phones out.
Rick doesn’t sugarcoat the difficulty. “First-timers get humbled,” he says, not unkindly. “The elevation helps your ball fly, but the wind and the elevation changes on the back nine take that back fast.” He recommends calling ahead to ask about conditions and strongly suggests booking a tee time earlier in the day during summer — afternoon thunderstorms roll in from the mountains with little warning and no concern for your scorecard.
Green fees run roughly $89 to $109 depending on the day and season, with twilight rates dropping to around $60. That puts Towa in the range of a solid mid-tier resort course anywhere else in the country. Here, it’s one of the better values in the Southwest for what you actually get.
There’s a clubhouse with a restaurant that serves straightforward New Mexican food — you can eat a green chile cheeseburger on the patio and watch the mountains. Rick calls it “good enough to not ruin the round,” which, from him, reads as a genuine endorsement.
What distinguishes Towa from the resort courses further down in Scottsdale or even Albuquerque’s other options is harder to name precisely. Part of it is the tribal land context — there’s a grounded quality to the place that keeps it from feeling like a real estate sales pitch masquerading as a golf course. Part of it is Rick, and people like him, who treat regulars and first-timers with the same level of low-key courtesy. The shop is not aggressively merchandised. The cart girl doesn’t appear every hole. Nobody’s trying to upsell you.
“Some courses feel like they want your money and then want you gone,” Rick says. “We want you to come back.” After twenty-plus years of watching people fall for this place, he’s learned that the Sandias do most of the recruiting for him.
