Javier Arana

Javier de Arana e Ybarra (5 January 1905 – 14 January 1975), also known as Javier Arana, was an amateur golfer, sailor and golf course designer born in Bilbao, Spain. He sailed in the 6-metre class at the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics and shortly thereafter he started a career in golf, which included multiple wins in Spanish amateur tournaments.

During World War II, he studied topography and began designing golf courses, and since several of the Spanish courses were devastated during the war, he stepped in to help and eventually designed multiple courses, being usually considered the greatest Spanish golf course architect.

Sports career Javier was the older child of Luis Arana y Urigüen and Lola Ybarra's three sons. He was introduced to sports at a young age by his father, a leading sportsman. Luis was a successful businessman who was involved with the introduction of sports to Bilbao at the beginning of the 20th century, practicing football, athletics, sailing and golf.

Arana's body of work is not very extense: ten 18 hole courses in thirty years of professional activity. Unfortunately, his best years happened at a time where Spain lacked the money and required infrastructure to provide watering supply to most of his projects. Arana is considered the best golf course designer that Continental Europe has ever produced: his designs of El Saler, El Prat and Club de Campo have been regularly ranked as top golf courses in Continental Europe, hosting over 40 professional tour events, the 1965 Canada Cup and over 50 top-level amateur tournaments.

Coupled with his design career, Arana performed an important function in the area of greenkeeping and was the main advocate for proper maintenance as a key element to foster the growth of golf and golfers' enjoyment for years. The opening of El Prat and Club de Campo in the 1950s were a turning point in Spanish golf which evolved from sand greens to courses akin to those found in the British Isles, setting the foundations for various generations of golf players that have positioned Spanish golf at the privileged position it enjoys today.

Legacy In 2013, the economist Alfonso Erhardt Ybarra (Málaga, 1972) took almost five years to produce The Golf Courses of Javier Arana, a book about the stature of the character of Arana and the almost non-existent information that there was about him.