Spanish Wells Residents Own Their Golf Course, and It Shows

Most private country clubs in Southwest Florida answer to somebody far away. A developer holds the land use rights. A regional management group juggles a dozen properties and decides which one gets the new pickleball courts this budget cycle. A private equity fund owns the paper and the greens fees fund the interest payments. Members pay dues and hope the decisions upstream align with what happens on the ground.

Spanish Wells doesn't work that way. The 27-hole club at the center of this Bonita Springs community belongs to the people who live around it, and once you know that, a handful of things about daily life inside the gates start to make a different kind of sense.

The Purchase Nobody Outside the Gates Noticed

Spanish Wells Golf & Country Club opened in 1979, long before Bonita Beach Road looked anything like it does now. For years it ran as one of the finer members-only clubs in Lee County. Then the recession hit clubs like this one hard across the region, and Spanish Wells wasn't spared.

Rather than let an outside buyer take over the course, the Spanish Wells Community Association stepped in and bought it in January 2018. The stated reason was straightforward: protect the open space that the whole community sits around, and protect the home values that depend on it staying a golf course instead of becoming something else. The association then brought in Indigo Golf Partners to run day-to-day operations, a company that today operates the club as part of Troon's national portfolio.

That single decision is the reason nearly everything else in this piece exists. When homeowners own the asset, the capital spent on it comes from the same people who play on it, walk past it, and vote on it at annual meetings. There's no distant shareholder deciding whether the East nine gets new drainage this year or whether it waits.

What Ownership Actually Paid For

That same year, the club completed a $1.5 million renovation of the South and East nines. All eighteen greens across those courses were rebuilt with Tif-Eagle Bermuda, a tour-grade turf variety chosen for putting consistency rather than looks. Crews reshaped green surrounds, restored the lake banks, and reworked drainage and irrigation so the courses could handle Southwest Florida's rain patterns without turning soft for weeks after a storm.

The clubhouse kitchen was rebuilt in the same stretch, and the club brought on Executive Chef Scott Savage to run it. That's not a franchise directive handed down from a corporate office. It's a capital assessment residents approved, spent on a kitchen residents actually eat in.

The membership structure that resulted from all this reflects the same logic. Of the eight subdivisions inside Spanish Wells, only Cordova bundles a club membership automatically into the home purchase, a Social Membership with the option to upgrade to Full Golf. The other seven subdivisions leave membership optional. Nobody outside Cordova is forced to fund the club they don't use, which is a very different arrangement than the all-in mandatory dues structure common at developer-run clubs elsewhere in the region.

The Golf Course Is Public. Almost Nothing Else Is.

Here's the detail that trips people up if they haven't looked closely. Spanish Wells is a private, gated community, but its golf course isn't private in the way most people assume. Anyone can walk in off Bonita Beach Road and book a tee time on any of the 27 holes. The public is also welcome to eat in the clubhouse dining room, but only on a day they've actually played golf there. Every other amenity, the fitness center, the tennis courts, the pool, the pickleball program, the bocce courts, is reserved strictly for members and their guests.

Then there's The Pub. Visitor reviews describe walking in for lunch on an NFL Sunday, finding a full bar and dining room, and watching the season opener on a wall of televisions, no mention anywhere of having played a round first. The Pub operates as the club's fully public front door, separate from the golfer-only dining rule that governs the main clubhouse.

That layered structure isn't an accident. A member-owned club needs green fees from public golfers and casual traffic through The Pub to keep the books balanced without pushing dues higher every year. At the same time, it needs to protect the amenities members actually fund through their assessments from turning into a public facility they're subsidizing for strangers. The two-tier access rule is what a homeowner-run budget looks like when it has to serve two different audiences at once.

Pickleball as a Case Study in Who Decides

If you want to see what member-directed capital looks like in real time, look at what happened to the courts. Tennis had the space to itself for years. As pickleball turned into the fastest-growing racket sport in the country, the club converted and built out four dedicated courts and brought on Dominic Dent, a PPR-certified instructor, as Director of Courts. By 2025 he'd been teaching pickleball at the club for three years, running open play, clinics, in-house leagues, and a travel league through the CourtMatch booking system.

That's a modest example, but it's the point. A regional management company juggling a dozen properties makes court allocation decisions based on what performs best across the portfolio. A member-owned club builds courts because the people who live there are the ones asking for them, and they're the ones who'll vote on the assessment that pays for it.

The Track Record That Followed

The results have shown up in the club's operating numbers and in industry recognition. At the Troon Global Leadership Conference, the club's operator, Indigo Sports, was named 2022 Facility of the Year, and GM Bill Shiles has picked up Indigo's Regional GM of the Year honors along with back-to-back Regional Top Performer of the Year recognition. Shiles has also noted the club runs around 175 active bocce members, a program size that reflects steady, organic growth rather than a marketing push.

The club's visibility outside the gates has grown too. In June 2026, Southwest Florida Business Today hosted its first networking event for area business owners and executives at Spanish Wells Golf & Country Club, a sign that the property has become recognizable enough in the broader Bonita Springs business community to host outside gatherings, not just internal member functions.

What This Means for Anyone Who Lives Here

None of this is a pitch to buy or sell anything. It's context for a place many of you already call home. The next time an HOA notice mentions a capital assessment, a line item for course maintenance, or a vote on club spending, it's worth remembering what that structure actually is. It isn't a bill from a distant landlord. It's the same mechanism that paid for the Tif-Eagle greens, the renovated kitchen, and the four pickleball courts that didn't exist a few years ago. The decisions get made by the people who show up to the meetings, and the budget gets spent on the property the people who live here actually use.

That's a different relationship to a country club than most communities in this part of Florida get to have, and it's part of what makes Spanish Wells function the way it does day to day.

If you're weighing what a club like this means for your own plans in Bonita Springs, whether you already live inside the gates or you're just getting to know the area, GulfLifeHome is a resource worth having in your corner. Discover Your Gulf Coast Lifestyle — Contact Kyle.