Golf around Mount Dora

The Two Traditional Courses

If you want the full Mount Dora experience, start at Mount Dora Golf Club, on South Highland Street. It carries a 4.1 rating from 341 reviews, which is a solid, unglamorous score—the kind a course earns by being dependable rather than flashy. This is the town’s working course, where the greens see steady traffic from locals who do not need a resort badge to justify a round.

Across town, The Country Club of Mount Dora on Country Club Boulevard scores slightly higher at 4.4, though with fewer reviews at 166. That gap in numbers tells you something: it is a quieter, more private-feeling operation, even if the name makes it sound exclusive. For visitors, it offers a different pace—less crowded, more deliberate. Between the two, you can build a full weekend without repeating a single hole, and both sit within a ten-minute drive of the downtown core.

The Disc Golf Option

Here is where Mount Dora stops being predictable. Lincoln Avenue Park West Disc Golf Course, at 1301 East 11th Avenue, is the highest-rated of the three at 4.6 from 77 reviews. It is not a country club. It is not even a traditional course. But it is the most democratic way to play golf in this town—no tee times, no dress code, just a park and a basket.

The course sits on the east side, away from the antique shops and the lakeside promenade. It is the kind of place where the median age of 48.8 years in Mount Dora becomes obvious: you will see retirees with custom bags and teenagers with a single disc. Both are welcome. The review count is low, which means it has not been discovered by the crowds that clog the Arts Festival weekend in February. That is a feature, not a bug.

What the Numbers Say

Mount Dora is not a golf destination in the way Naples or Ponte Vedra are. The census data makes that clear: 8,121 total housing units, but only 500 held for seasonal or recreational use. This is a town of primary residences, not second homes. The median household income is $69,931, and the median home value is $316,100—comfortable, but not the kind of wealth that builds a gated golf community.

What the area lacks in championship pedigree it makes up for in access. The unemployment rate sits at 5.1 percent, which is unremarkable for Florida, but the 37.5 percent of residents with a bachelor’s degree suggests a certain professional class that fills fairways on weekdays, not just weekends. These are people who moved here for the lake and the hill, then discovered the courses were good enough to keep.

The Context of the Place

Remember what Mount Dora is: a town that named itself after a lake in 1883, which surveyors had already named in 1846 for Dora Ann Drawdy. It was sold as a winter resort from the start, with the Alexander House opening as a hotel in 1883. That resort DNA persists. The Lakeside Inn, which began as that same two-storey Alexander House, still anchors the waterfront. The 35-foot lighthouse at Grantham Point, dedicated on 25 March 1988, remains the only inland freshwater lighthouse in Florida—a fact the town repeats with quiet pride.

Golf here fits that history. It is not a spectacle. It is an amenity, like the lake itself, that has been here long enough to feel permanent. The courses are not the reason you come to Mount Dora. They are the reason you stay an extra day after the Arts Festival, or the excuse to visit on a clear winter morning when the plateau gives you a view the rest of Florida cannot offer.

Play the traditional courses if you want the postcard. Play the disc golf if you want the real town. Either way, you will leave with a better sense of why this small hill keeps its residents.