You will either love playing from 18-foot-deep, 60-foot-wide, grassed fairway “craters” or you won’t. You’ll delight in the 13,000-square-foot, three-tiered, oceanic, No. 7 green, the palm-in-a-bunker fronting the 5th green, and the 170-yard lava flow of limestone down the middle of No. 9 fairway—or you’ll think Mr. Paul Burke Dye, a.k.a. Señor Undulation, is a loon. But you’ll certainly remember your day. (Bring a 60-degree wedge.)

Playa Paraiso, surrounded by the resort’s tropical pinks, purples and reds, can be so gnarly from the tips that the director of golf, Greg Bond, deliberately omitted the yardage from the scorecard. “The back tees play at just under 6,800 yards at a Slope of 136,” Bond confesses with a chuckle, “but we really don’t want the 15-handicapper to know that. It will chew you up and spit you out.” A million-dollar maintenance budget with a 42-man crew keeps Playa Paraiso nearly flawless.

Another Greg Norman project, Playa Mujeres, three miles north of Cancun, opened in June and is part of a $1.5 billion development that boasts a marina, four-mile beach and a 1,200-year-old Mayan ruin—all private.

Two other enjoyable Florida-style courses are the Playacar Spa & Golf Club, a 1994 Robert von Hagge design in touristy Playa del Carmen, an hour south of Cancun, and a big, wide, 27-hole Nicklaus resort track at Moon Palace Spa & Golf Club that beckons the club-renting tourist.

From the appropriately colored black and blue tees, bruising Playacar plays at 7,144 and 6,639 yards, with humbling Slope ratings of 148 and 142. The dense jungle thicket is seemingly just a clublength from the cart path all day long, almost as close as you can get to the three-foot iguanas sunning on the rocks. The general manager, Fernando Sandoval, and sweet-swinging, course-record-holding (68) head pro, Adan “Niño” Alvarez, oversee a friendly, bilingual staff.

Moon Palace offers three benign nines (Lakes, Jungle and Dunes) that are buffed and trimmed like Westminster poodles. The Nicklaus Design Group has two other properties nearby: the excellent Cozumel Country Club and the Mayan Palace Golf Course, a creative 18-hole par-3 layout with holes from 103 to 276 yards.

Alas, be wary of the Cancun Golf Club at Pok-Ta-Pok, a 1976 Robert Trent Jones Jr. layout in the heart of Cancun’s hotel district. Fabulously sited between the Nichupte Lagoon and the Caribbean, Pok-Ta-Pok has weathered two hurricanes and years of neglect, and is now consumed by crabgrass—a West Texas muni at best. “It’s an embarrassment to us all,” says Playa Paraiso’s Bond, formerly Cancun’s general manager. He estimates that a complete renovation would cost at least $7 million.

Jones, who has designed more than 200 courses in 38 countries, tells LINKS that he has offered to “thoroughly refresh, restore and, if necessary, redesign, Pok-Ta-Pok for expenses only,” and that the new owners seemed responsive. “I’ve not seen the course in 25 years,” says Jones, “but like the City of Chicago’s famous Picasso sculpture, if they were to sell bits and pieces of it for scrap iron it would no longer be a Picasso. I don’t think that course can still be called a Robert Trent Jones Jr. course.”

Even so, the lineup of courses in the Riviera Maya will keep visiting golfers busy for a week, but here’s what’s coming in the next two years: Puerto Cancun, a Tom Weiskopf course next to Cancun’s hotel strip; Cancun Riviera, a Palace Resorts project; and TPC Cancun, with two 18-hole courses designed by Tom Fazio and Nick Price. And another half-dozen are reportedly in various stages of planning and permitting.

Which means the Riviera Maya is making a strong push at surpassing Cabo as a golf destination, a prospect the locals feel bullish about. Even if it doesn’t happen, the area’s current transformation from spring break mecca to golf destination is impressive enough.