What Bandon Smells Like: Gorse, Salt Air and Cranberry Bogs

By Hannah Ross, Home & Gifts

Ask someone who's been to Bandon Dunes what they remember, and you'll hear about the wind first. Then the views. But if you keep them talking long enough, someone usually brings up the smell.

That's the part we care about most. So this week we're skipping the usual course rundown and looking at Bandon the way your nose would.

First, the place

Bandon Dunes Golf Resort sits on the southern Oregon coast, just north of the small town of Bandon. Today it has five full-length courses and two par-3 courses, and you walk all of them. Carts aren't allowed unless you need one for medical reasons.

It started with one course. Bandon Dunes, designed by a young Scottish architect named David McLay Kidd, opened on May 19, 1999. Tom Doak's Pacific Dunes followed on July 1, 2001, and quickly passed it as the highest-rated course on the property. Then came Bandon Trails (Coore and Crenshaw, 2005), Old Macdonald (Doak and Jim Urbina, 2010) and Sheep Ranch (Coore and Crenshaw, 2020). The newest, a 19-hole par-3 course called Shorty's, opened in May 2024.

Every one of them is shaped by the same coastline. And that coastline has a very particular smell.

A golfer on the 16th green at Bandon Dunes with the Pacific behind him The 16th green at Bandon Dunes. Photo: Mwlloyd1216 via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Gorse: the yellow shrub with a surprising scent

If you've played Bandon, you've met the gorse. It's the dense, spiny shrub with bright yellow flowers that eats golf balls on the edges of the fairways.

Here's the part most golfers don't know: gorse flowers smell like coconut. Walk past a patch on a warm day and it's a little like sunscreen drifting in on the wind.

Gorse also has a history in Bandon that goes well beyond lost balls. It isn't native to Oregon. The town was named by George Bennett, an Irish settler who arrived in 1873 and named it after his hometown of Bandon in County Cork. He's also the one who brought gorse over from Ireland. It spread fast, and because the plant is full of natural oils, it burns easily. On September 26, 1936, a forest fire east of town turned west with the wind, the gorse caught, and Bandon's entire commercial district burned. Firefighters found that spraying burning gorse with water only scattered it, a little like a grease fire.

The town still lives with it. Bandon has rules about how tall and thick gorse can grow, and the resort has cleared a good amount of it from the original course since it opened.

So that sweet, coconut-y smell on a calm afternoon? It comes with a story.

Salt air and wind

The rest of the Bandon smell is simpler, and it's everywhere: the ocean. Bandon Dunes, Pacific Dunes and Sheep Ranch all have holes on the bluffs above the Pacific (Sheep Ranch alone has about a mile of ocean frontage), so the salt air comes straight in off the water. Bandon Trails is the exception. It's the one course on the property with no holes along the ocean, winding through dunes, meadow and forest instead, so expect more trees than sea spray.

The wind is part of it too. Sheep Ranch sits on land that was once a wind farm in the 1970s. It was abandoned because the wind was too strong for the turbines of that era. That's the kind of air golfers sign up for at Bandon.

Cranberries in the fall

There's one more scent people forget, and it's especially fitting this time of year. Bandon calls itself the Cranberry Capital of Oregon. More than 100 growers farm about 1,600 acres around town, producing about 95 percent of Oregon's cranberries. Bandon was also where cranberry bogs were first wet-harvested, which means flooding the bogs so the berries float.

The town has thrown a Cranberry Festival every September since 1946. If your Bandon trip lands in early fall, you may catch harvest season on the way in.

Bringing it home

We'll be honest about one thing: you can't fit all of that in a jar. Our Bandon candles don't smell like coconut or cranberries. For both Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes, we went with White Sage Lavender, which is herbal and a little earthy, closer to coastal scrub and cool ocean air than anything sweet. It's a good pick when you want the house to feel like a long, windy walk.

Bandon Dunes Golf Course Candle from Course Candles The Bandon Dunes Golf Course Candle, 9oz, $29.99.

The Bandon Dunes candle is the one we'd pick for someone who made the trip and still talks about the original course. The Pacific Dunes candle is for the friend who will tell you, unprompted, that Pacific is the best one there. Both come in a 9oz reusable glass jar with a soy wax blend and a cotton wick, so the jar can stay on the shelf after the candle's done.

Pacific Dunes Golf Course Candle from Course Candles The Pacific Dunes Golf Course Candle, 9oz, $29.99.

A few gift ideas that pair well:

  • For the group trip: one candle for whoever organized it. They did the spreadsheet and the tee times. It's the least you can do.
  • For the trip that hasn't happened yet: a candle on the desk is a good reminder to actually book it.
  • For a fall birthday or the holidays: a Bandon candle with a printed photo from the trip tucked into the box.

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