From its earliest years, La Costa built its reputation around golf. The resort hosted the Tournament of Champions — later renamed the Mercedes Championships — for thirty years, from 1969 to 1998, when that event moved to Maui, Hawaii. Its replacement was even more prestigious: La Costa hosted the inaugural WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship in 1999, one of the World Golf Championships events carrying the highest prize purses on the PGA Tour. The resort hosted that event for seven of the next eight years, until it moved to Arizona in 2007. The 2001 event was played in Australia as an exception.

In 2010 and 2012, La Costa hosted the Kia Classic, an LPGA Tour event that drew an estimated 43,000 spectators in 2010 alone. The combination of PGA Tour and LPGA events over four decades established La Costa as a significant venue in professional golf — not just a beautiful backdrop but a course that tested the best players in the world.

In March 1975, Penthouse magazine published an article headlined 'La Costa: The Hundred Million-Dollar Resort with Criminal Clientele,' written by Jeff Gerth and Lowell Bergman. The piece alleged that La Costa had been developed using loans from the Teamsters Pension Fund and was a resort patronized by organized crime figures. Resort owners Mervyn Adelson and Irwin Molasky, along with two officials including Morris B. 'Moe' Dalitz and Allard Roen, filed a libel lawsuit demanding $522 million from the magazine and its writers.

The litigation lasted a decade. In 1982, a jury found the magazine not liable. The plaintiffs appealed. Before a new trial could begin, both sides settled in December 1985, with Penthouse issuing a statement clarifying it had not meant to imply Adelson and Molasky were themselves organized crime members. Total litigation costs exceeded $20 million. In 2013, Vanity Fair published an interview in which Adelson reportedly admitted to mob ties — decades after the lawsuit that sought to deny any such connection.

La Costa has changed hands multiple times since Molasky and Adelson opened it in 1965. Sports Shinko, a Japanese company, acquired it in 1987 and held it until 2001, when KSL Resorts took over. Whitehall Street Real Estate Funds purchased it in 2007, KSL Capital Partners in 2010, and Omni Hotels & Resorts in 2013 — the ownership that persists today.

Despite the ownership changes, the resort's identity has remained consistent: golf, tennis, spa, and the particular combination of landscaped elegance and California sunshine that characterizes the best of Southern California's resort tradition. La Costa is a member of Historic Hotels of America, an acknowledgment that six decades of continuous operation in the coastal foothills of Carlsbad have made it not just a resort but a landmark — one with more history than most, including some it would probably prefer to forget.

The resort sits in the coastal foothills south of Carlsbad, in the enclave community of La Costa that takes its name from the property itself. The landscape is classic Southern California chaparral softened by irrigation — rolling hills covered in manicured turf, stands of mature eucalyptus and palm, the Pacific barely out of sight to the west. On clear days, the Santa Ana winds push inland air out to sea and the resort's high ground offers views toward the ocean that remind visitors why someone decided, in the early 1960s, that this equestrian ranch was the right place for a resort.

The first guests paid $22 a night for rooms that came with horses, tennis, and golf. Today's guests pay considerably more and the horses are gone, but the basic proposition remains the same: this is a place where the Southern California landscape can be enjoyed at its most accommodating, in surroundings designed specifically for pleasure.