Grand Theft Auto VI is set in Leonida — a state built out of six very different places, only one of which is the neon city everybody pictures. This is a guide to what to expect from each of them: the ground under your feet, the people who live on it, what Rockstar has actually said, and what is still only rumoured.
59 locations catalogued across the six, each one linked to its own entry and its own evidence.
We're a long way from the '80s, but Vice City is still the sun and fun capital of America. The glamour, hustle, and greed of America captured in a single city.
Rockstar Games, on Vice City
Vice City is the reason the rest of the state has to explain itself. It is where the money is, where the cameras are, and where every character in this game is ultimately trying to end up — a strip of sand and glass that sells the same fantasy it sold forty years ago, to a very different set of buyers.
The version Rockstar is building is emphatically not the 1986 one. The pastel Art Deco hotels are still standing on the beach and still full, but the towers behind them have doubled in height and the wealth arriving in the city now comes with lawyers. The result is a city with two skylines: the low, bright, tourist-facing one along the water, and the corporate one a mile inland that owns it.
It is also the most layered place on the map. The beach neighbourhoods run the nightlife and the crowds; downtown runs the money; Little Cuba, La Perle and the Stockyard run the culture the beach borrows from and the rest of the state resents. The port and the airport keep everything moving, legally and otherwise, and the Leonida Penitentiary sits close enough to remind everyone what the downside looks like.
For Jason and Lucia this is the target rather than the home. The pair's ambitions all point here — Boobie Ike's clubs and Only Raw Records, Raul Bautista's bank crews, the money that never quite arrives. Vice City is the place where a good score becomes a life, and where a bad one becomes a headline.
Far more buildings will be enterable than in any previous GTA, with figures between 40% and 70% thrown around.
Insider claims and community reads of the September 2022 development leak, whose debug text referenced well over a hundred distinct interiors. Rockstar has never given a number.
Leonida is roughly twice the size of GTA V’s map, at something like 120–130 square miles.
Fan measurements taken off trailer footage and the in-game map art. Rockstar has published no figure for the size of the state at all.
The dress code is casual, the bars are loaded. Life in this tropical archipelago isn’t flashy but it’s easy. Get your buzz on and pull up a deck chair but look out—you are right on the doorstep of some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America.
Rockstar Games, on Leonida Keys
The Keys are where the game starts and the slowest place on the map, which is not a coincidence. This is a chain of islands with one road down the middle, a bar every few miles, and an economy that has quietly run on smuggling for as long as anyone has been keeping score.
Jason lives here, in a stilt house he does not pay for, on land belonging to Brian Heder — a man who spent the golden age of Keys smuggling doing the work himself and now prefers to have it done for him. Brian's Boat Works & Marina is the region in miniature: a legitimate business, a fishing charter clientele, and a back end that explains the boats.
The appeal of the place is that nothing about it looks like a crime scene. Deck chairs, cold beer, sunburn, a bar called The Rusty Anchor. But the water that makes it beautiful is also the shortest route to somewhere Leonida law does not reach, and everybody living out here knows exactly which boats leave at odd hours.
Geographically it is the one region that forces a different pace on you. There is essentially one road, the sea is never more than a few hundred metres away, and getting anywhere in a hurry usually means getting wet.
Diving and underwater exploration return in a big way here — reefs, wrecks and submerged caves.
Widely anticipated by the community from the region’s geography and from GTA V’s own underwater content. Rockstar has shown water traversal but has not described a diving system.
The untamable jewel of Leonida’s crown. You never know what lies beneath the surface of this primordial expanse. The gators may be the most famous attraction, but there are far deadlier predators and weirder discoveries among the mangroves.
Rockstar Games, on Grassrivers
Grassrivers is the part of the state that was never developed because it could not be. A shallow, slow-moving sheet of water the size of a county, full of things with teeth, crossed by a handful of raised roads and otherwise navigable only by machines built specifically for it.
This is where the airboat comes in — a genuinely new vehicle class, and one that exists because nothing else in the game can cross this ground. Cars are stuck on the causeways, boats bottom out in inches of water, and the region is designed around that limitation rather than in spite of it.
Rockstar has been unusually cheerful about how hostile the place is. The official line leads with alligators and then points out that they are not the problem. What lives beyond them is left deliberately vague, which given this studio is less an oversight than an invitation.
It is also the practical region. Vice City is an hour east, and the wetlands are what you drive into when something needs to disappear — a habit the trailers have already shown, with Jason running an airboat chase from a helicopter across open swamp.
This is Leonida’s forgotten coast. Cheap motels, shut-down attractions, and empty strip malls won’t bring the tourists back, but there’s a new economy in this once-popular vacation spot. It’s fueled by malt liquor, painkillers, and truck stop energy drinks. Jump on a dirt bike and hold onto your wallet.
Rockstar Games, on Port Gellhorn
Port Gellhorn is what happens to a beach town when the beach stops being the reason people come. It had its decades — the motels and the mini-golf and the raceway were all built for someone — and what is left is a town of working docks, boarded frontage and an economy that has quietly reorganised itself around whatever still sells.
Rockstar’s own copy is brutal about it, and that bluntness is the tell: this is the region the game is using to say something. Where Vice City satirises money, Port Gellhorn is about its absence — painkillers, malt liquor, a minimall with three tenants and a motel renting by the week.
It is also, mechanically, the roughest and most fun place to drive. The official pitch is a dirt bike, the raceway is a real venue on the map, and the Bocamar Bridge is one of the few genuine landmarks in a region otherwise made of low buildings and parking lots.
Expect it to matter early. A town this cheap and this unwatched is where two people with a record and no money start — a long way from the beach, and close enough to reach it.
The battle for the health and wealth of Leonida begins here. In the heart of Leonida, American industry and old school values still reign supreme—whatever the cost. The Allied Crystal sugar refinery provides the jobs, while the local biker gang provides almost everything else.
Rockstar Games, on Ambrosia
Ambrosia is a company town, and the company is sugar. The Allied Crystal refinery employs the place, funds the place, and by Rockstar’s own account is in a fight over the health and wealth of the whole state — which is a remarkable thing to put in a region description for a town of a few thousand people.
What the refinery does not provide, the local motorcycle club does. That division of labour is stated outright in the official copy, and it is the cleanest summary of the region anyone could write: one employer, one alternative, and no third option.
Around it is the interior Florida that tourists drive past — cane fields burning at the edges, a lake big enough to have its own weather, and an idea of the country that the coast has spent forty years embarrassing. The politics are on the surface here in a way they are not anywhere else on the map.
It is also the region with the least polish and the most noise. Mud parks, drag strips, an industrial plant running around the clock, and a social order that predates every condo tower in Vice City.
Room to breathe on the state’s northern fringes. A national landmark up against the state’s northern border, Mount Kalaga offers prime hunting, fishing, and off-road trails. In the lush surrounding backwoods, hillbilly mystics and paranoid radicals live far from the prying eyes of the government.
Rockstar Games, on Mount Kalaga
Mount Kalaga is the region that gives the game away as something bigger than a Miami story. Leonida is Florida, and Florida does not have mountains — so Rockstar built one anyway, put a national park on it, and used it to buy a whole category of terrain the rest of the state cannot offer.
The official pitch is hunting, fishing and off-road trails, which is an unusually literal answer to "what do you do here". This is the wilderness region: forest to the horizon, rivers worth a boat, and the kind of elevation that turns a drive into a decision.
It is also the strangest place on the map socially. Rockstar’s own words are "hillbilly mystics and paranoid radicals", living deliberately out of reach of a government they do not recognise. Every GTA has a fringe; this one has been given a mountain range and a hundred miles of forest to be strange in.
The visual language the trailers use for it is closer to Red Dead Redemption 2 than to any Grand Theft Auto — deer at a riverbank, mist between ridges, weather doing whatever it likes. Whatever this region is for narratively, it exists to make the state feel like a state rather than a city with a hinterland.
These 8 are confirmed to exist in the state, but nothing we hold places them in a particular region — so they are listed here rather than assigned to one on a guess.
Region names, taglines and the quoted descriptions on this page are Rockstar's own, from Rockstar Games — Grand Theft Auto VI, Only in Leonida . Everything else is written here, and anything we cannot source is marked as unconfirmed.
