La Maviglia, an ultra-luxury resort under construction on 202 hectares outside Maruggio in the province of Taranto, is scheduled to open in 2027. The programme runs to 70 suites, 35 villas, a 20-room golfers' lodge, four restaurants, a 5,000-square-metre wellness and medical spa, and a private beach club. Everything on the estate is arranged around one feature: an 18-hole championship course laid across 75 hectares of olive grove, vineyard and Mediterranean scrub.

That is the part worth pausing on. Puglia has spent fifteen years converting its masserie into hotels, and the format is now well understood: a fortified stone farmhouse, twenty or thirty rooms, a pool cut into the courtyard, olive oil from the estate. What Puglia does not have is championship golf. La Maviglia is a bet that the missing category is the one that justifies the scale.

The estate

The site sits less than a kilometre from the Gulf of Taranto, on the Ionian side of the heel, near the stretch of protected coast at Monaco Mirante that locals call the sea of the seven colours. It is inside the Primitivo growing area, with Manduria and its vineyards immediately inland. Bari and Brindisi handle scheduled flights. Taranto-Grottaglie, which handles private and cargo traffic, is around 40 kilometres north.

The property is owned by Ultimate Collection Ltd, a Swiss company based in Kilchberg, and the project is led by Nicola Cortese, who is credited as founder and describes the search for the land as the harder half of the work. His account of first seeing the site leans on its silence and its scale rather than any particular building, which tracks with what the masterplan does: it treats the existing landscape, the monumental olive trees, the dry-stone walls, the macchia, as the fixed constraints and fits the new construction around them.

At the centre is Masseria Maviglia, a 16th-century fortified farmhouse being restored and lightly extended to serve as the clubhouse. It gets a new restaurant, bar and lounge, members-only facilities and shops, and indoor and outdoor event space. The crenellated gatehouse and the arcaded front are staying as they are.

The course

The course is by Städler & Reinmuth Golfdesign, working with the irrigation designer Giles Wardle and the agronomists at Turfgrass, who also advise Adare Manor, the venue for the 2027 Ryder Cup. It is an 18-hole par 72 across 75 hectares, with a two-sided playable driving range and an extensive short-game area.

The masterplan shows water in play at several points, and the renders put at least one green on a lake edge. Elsewhere the design routes around century-old olive and fig trees rather than clearing them, and works the dune landscape and the macchia into the run of play. Trulli, the conical dry-stone huts that are Puglia's signature vernacular and whose best-known concentration at Alberobello is a UNESCO World Heritage site, sit inside the property and have been kept in play as course features.

The most theatrical of these is an 18th-century neoclassical triumphal arch that the routing runs past, with the Ionian visible beyond it. Several holes are being positioned as signature holes, and the stated ambition is to host tournaments. That ambition is doing real work in the business plan, because a course that can hold an event is a course that can be marketed internationally, and international is the only market that supports this room rate.

Rooms, villas, spa

The hotel is suites only. Seventy of them, from 60-square-metre junior suites to three-bedroom presidential suites at 400 square metres, each with a terrace, loggia or private garden, and twelve with private pools. Four food outlets: fine dining, a pool restaurant, a dedicated breakfast and bar complex, and a restaurant attached to the spa.

The spa is the number that stands out. Five thousand square metres is not a hotel spa, it is a medical facility with consultation and treatment rooms, a wet area, relaxation zones, sports facilities and a covered outdoor lap pool. Resorts build at that size when they expect guests to stay long enough for a protocol rather than a massage, which suggests stays measured in weeks.

The 35 villas run from two to six en-suite bedrooms and 120 to 650 square metres, each with a pool and a gated garden on a plot of 1,000 to 5,000 square metres. They are grouped into four clusters named for what surrounds them: Uliveto in the olive grove, Macchia in the scrub, Trullo where the stone huts are, and Primitivo among the vines. Several villas are built around existing trulli.

Interiors are by Oppenheim Architecture, with Enea Landscape Architecture on the grounds. The renders show plaster, local limestone, timber ceilings and very little else, with the openings framing olive trees. It is a restrained register for a project of this budget, and a sensible one, because the alternative in Puglia is pastiche. The visualisations throughout are by Harris & Kalinka.

What the masterplan shows

The site plan is more revealing than the renders. Golf occupies roughly a third of the estate and wraps the accommodation on three sides, so the villas and the hotel look out over fairway rather than at each other. The working parts, a logistics and maintenance centre, a farmhouse, a solar array and a helipad, are pushed to the northern and western edges, away from the guest circulation. There is a single security lodge controlling the main access, which tells you the intended experience is gated in the literal sense.

The sustainability claims are specific enough to check later: renewable energy on site, organic vegetable farming, wine production and olive oil manufacturing. An estate this size in this location can plausibly feed its own restaurants, and the vineyards and olive groves were already producing before anyone drew a golf hole through them.

The bet

La Maviglia is trying to do something that has not really been done on the Ionian coast, which is to make a destination resort work outside the two months when southern Italy is full. Golf is the mechanism. A course that plays well from March to November extends the season at both ends, a medical spa fills the middle of it, and villas with six bedrooms and their own pools sell to a buyer who was never going to book a masseria room in the first place.

The risk is the same one every large resort in a quiet region carries. Two hundred and two hectares, three excavated lakes and a five-thousand-square-metre spa require a volume of guests that Maruggio has never seen, and the nearest scheduled airports are ninety minutes away. Whether the golf is good enough to pull them is the question the next two years will answer. Construction is underway, with opening set for 2027.