Romagna vineyards and farmland stretching across the valley floor toward the Apennine hills — the agricultural landscape that surrounds Rimini Verucchio Golf Club.

Sustainability

A course in a working valley

This is land the Malatesta walked, and Villanovan settlers before them. We think about our footprint on it in those terms — not as a marketing exercise, but as a long view worth taking seriously.

The Valmarecchia itself

Rimini Verucchio Golf Club sits on the valley floor beside the Marecchia river, among vineyard-covered hills, with the medieval skylines of Verucchio, Torriana and San Leo rising around it and San Marino's towers visible from the closing holes. The course was routed into that landscape rather than over it, and the way we look after the ground follows the same instinct.

We think of ourselves as custodians of this stretch of the valley rather than its owners in any permanent sense. That framing shapes the smaller decisions — how the rough is left to grow, where water goes, what is planted along the margins — as much as the larger ones.

Monte Titano and San Marino at sunset, seen from the Valmarecchia valley — the view from the course's closing holes.

The Marecchia and its tributaries run through the round, and the river corridor that comes with them is home to herons, kingfishers and roe deer, along with a quiet that is increasingly rare this close to the Adriatic coast. It is worth protecting for what it is, not only for what it does for the course.

"The river runs through the round, and the quiet that comes with it is worth protecting for what it is."

Water

Irrigation in a dry-summer valley

The Valmarecchia sees increasingly dry summers, and a golf course is an honest consumer of water. We are working toward smarter irrigation — using the course conditions themselves as the guide, rather than a fixed schedule — and toward fairway grass that copes better with a hot, dry August without demanding more from the river.

None of this is finished, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up as a completed programme.

Vineyards at harvest in the Romagna countryside — the wider agricultural valley that Rimini Verucchio Golf Club sits within.

Valley ecology

The Marecchia corridor

The river corridor that runs through the course is habitat as much as it is scenery — for pollinators, for the birdlife that follows the water, for the roe deer that cross at dawn. We try to leave the margins of the course to look after that, rather than mowing and spraying every edge to the same standard as the fairways.

We are moving toward electric carts and a lighter-touch mowing fleet over time, and we would rather describe that as a direction of travel than promise a finished date we cannot yet stand behind.

What we have not yet solved

We hold no certifications and make no awards claims here — this is simply where we are honest about the questions still open:

Guests fly in.

A good share of our visitors arrive by air. We do not currently account for that travel in any formal way, and we have not settled on the right approach yet.
Water in dry summers.

The Valmarecchia faces real summer drought pressure, and a golf course is not a light user of water. We are working on it rather than claiming to have solved it.
Lawn-style fairways.

Golfers generally expect lush, even colour. Fairways that brown gracefully in August are probably the more honest answer ecologically, but changing expectations takes time, and we have not fully made that case to our own members yet.

If you have questions about how we look after the course and the valley around it, we would rather talk it through directly than publish a glossy summary. Get in touch.

Get in touch