GTA 6 Real Life Locations: Leonida vs Florida, Side by Side

Every GTA 6 place Rockstar named, next to the real Florida spot an outlet compared it to, and who said so. Plus the Miami landmarks seen in trailers.

Leonida is Rockstar's Florida, and Vice City is its Miami. Nobody seriously disputes that, and Game Informer, which interviewed Rockstar for its Sep 29 2026 cover story, calls Florida Leonida's "real-world inspiration." The harder question, the one this page answers, is narrower: for each place Rockstar has actually named, which real spot has a named outlet compared it to, and when?

Plenty of sites answer that by guessing. We do not. Every pairing below comes with the outlet that made it. Where no outlet we could open has made a comparison, the table says so, and we leave the blank blank.

If you want the places themselves, what Rockstar says about each and where they sit, start with our GTA 6 map and Leonida pages. This page is only the real-world match-up.

At a glance

Item	Detail	Source
Real-world model	Florida	Game Informer, Sep 29 2026; Kotaku, Dec 5 2023
Vice City's model	Miami	PC Gamer; VGC; Kotaku; Dexerto
Rockstar-named places with an outlet pairing	All 6 regions, plus 3 of the 17 smaller places	Table below
Smaller places with no outlet pairing we could find	13	List below
Real Miami landmarks outlets spotted in Rockstar's trailers	14 in our table	Miami New Times, Kotaku, Dexerto
What Rockstar says is not in	Exact versions of Orlando, Walt Disney World and Universal Studios	Dexerto, reporting Game Informer, Sep 30 2026

What is counted, and how

We started from the six regions and 17 smaller places Rockstar has named, as listed on our map page. For each, we looked for a reputable outlet that compared it to a real place in an article we could open ourselves: Game Informer, VGC, PC Gamer, Kotaku, GamesRadar+, Dexerto and the Miami New Times. Some big outlets refused our requests, so they are not cited here.

Three rules:

A pairing needs a named outlet. "Fans say" does not count. Fan wikis do not count.
The outlet's confidence is kept. If Dexerto says "all signs are pointing towards" a city, we do not upgrade that to a fact.
Trailer landmarks are kept apart. A building spotted in a trailer is not a place Rockstar has named, so those go in a separate table.

The side-by-side table

GTA VI place	Region	Real-world inspiration	Who said so
Leonida	The whole state	Florida	Game Informer, Sep 29 2026 ("real-world inspiration"); Kotaku, Dec 5 2023 ("Leonida (Florida)"); PC Gamer ("Florida-inspired")
Vice City	Vice City	Miami	PC Gamer ("inspired by real-life Miami proper"); VGC, Sep 29 2026 ("drawing heavily from Miami"); Kotaku, Dec 5 2023; Dexerto (Downtown Miami)
Leonida Keys	Leonida Keys	The Florida Keys	Game Informer, May 6 2025 ("a clear parody of the Florida Keys"); VGC, Sep 29 2026; Dexerto
Grassrivers	Grassrivers	The Everglades	PC Gamer; VGC, Sep 29 2026; Dexerto ("clearly heavily inspired by Florida's Everglades")
Port Gellhorn	Port Gellhorn	Panama City, hedged. VGC instead points to Florida's smaller tourist towns in decline	Dexerto (says it is "tough to pinpoint" but "all signs" point to Panama City); VGC, Sep 29 2026
Ambrosia, and its Allied Crystal sugar refinery	Ambrosia	The towns around Lake Okeechobee; the refinery resembles the U.S. Sugar refinery in Clewiston	Dexerto (says Ambrosia is "tough to nail down")
Mount Kalaga National Park	Mount Kalaga	Draws on the culture of the Florida-Georgia border	VGC, Sep 29 2026, reporting Game Informer's cover story
Ocean View Hotel	Not stated by Rockstar	The Clevelander, Miami Beach ("the hotel signs are styled exactly the same way")	Dexerto. Separately, the Miami New Times placed a Trailer 2 pool scene at "what can only be the Clevelander," May 7 2025. PC Gamer links the name back to the 2002 game's Ocean View Hotel
VC Port	Vice City	PortMiami	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023, matched the port in Trailer 1 to the Port of Miami. Rockstar named the VC Port, "the cruise ship capital of the world," in May 2025

Leaving out the state row, that covers all six regions and three of the 17 smaller places: the Allied Crystal refinery, the Ocean View Hotel and the VC Port. Mount Kalaga National Park is the region's own full name, so it shares the region's row. Note how thin the Mount Kalaga match is: a culture, not a place.

Places with no outlet pairing we could find

Ocean Beach, Little Cuba, the Tisha-Wocka flea market, Southside Vice City, Washington Beach, Gambit Bay, Watson Bay, the Paradise Garage, Shore Drive, the Vercetti Estate, Stockyard, Lake Leonida and Leonida Penitentiary. That is 13 of the 17 smaller places.

A few of these look obvious. Little Cuba next to Little Havana is the one everyone mentions. But the outlets we opened either tie these names back to the 2002 game (GamesRadar+ says returning players will "instantly recognize" Ocean Beach and Little Cuba) or do not discuss them at all. Our Leonida page gives its own readings for several, clearly marked as our observations. They stay out of this table.

Real Miami landmarks spotted in Rockstar's trailers

These are buildings and streets that outlets say they recognized in Rockstar's own trailers. Rockstar has not named any of them, so treat each as that outlet's identification.

Real place	What the outlet saw	Trailer	Who said so
Seven Mile Bridge, Florida Keys	The long bridge to the Keys	Trailer 1	Kotaku, Dec 5 2023; Miami New Times, Jan 13 2025
Port of Miami	An in-game port with the downtown skyline behind it	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023
500 Brickell	Twin towers with a circular cutout	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023
Wynwood	An arts district and murals	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023; Kotaku, Dec 5 2023
Venetian Causeway and the Venetian Isle condo	The causeway and a stair-shaped building	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023; Dexerto
Rickenbacker Causeway, Virginia Key, Key Biscayne	Takes on all three	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023
Ocean Drive	Art deco strip, red sidewalks	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023; Dexerto
MacArthur Causeway and the Marquis	Westbound view, a tower with an identical cutout	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023
Club Space	A dance club with a similar DJ booth and hanging planters	Trailer 1	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023
E11even	The fictional club Nine 1 Nine: its airplane banner ads (Trailer 1), and Jason and Lucia dancing inside (Trailer 2, per Dexerto)	Trailers 1 and 2	Miami New Times, Dec 6 2023; Dexerto
Lummus Park	Jason working out	Trailer 2	Miami New Times, May 7 2025
The Clevelander	A nighttime poolside scene	Trailer 2	Miami New Times, May 7 2025
Metromover and Metrorail	Elevated trains in the city	Trailer 2	Miami New Times, May 7 2025
Little Haiti	A mural-covered wall	Trailer 2	Miami New Times, May 7 2025

The Jan 2025 New Times map credits its building matches to a fan account on X, so we used it only for the Seven Mile Bridge, which Kotaku also named. Kotaku also wrote that some of Trailer 1's run-down suburbs "feel as if" they invoke places like Pahokee, near Lake Okeechobee. That is a feeling, not a match, so it is not in the table.

What Rockstar says it left out

Rockstar has said one clear thing about what is not in. Game Informer asked whether central Florida, Orlando and its theme parks, would appear in some form. According to Dexerto's Sep 30 2026 report of that interview, Rockstar senior vice president of environment art Paul MacPherson said the team has to weigh landscapes, towns, landmarks and more before choosing what serves the game, and that "we may not have those exact locations." His goal, in his words, was "that full Florida experience."

So: no exact Walt Disney World, no exact Universal Studios, no exact Orlando. Whether Leonida has its own parody theme park is not answered.

There is also a reason the map is Miami-centered at all. Insider Gaming reported on Oct 14 2026, from a Bloomberg interview with Rockstar, that the project was first codenamed "Project Americas" and meant to cover large areas of North and South America, before it was scaled back to Miami and its surroundings. Our news brief has that report.

Pairings we did not use, and why

Fan wikis. Several give very specific matches, such as Port Gellhorn's bridge to Tampa Bay's Sunshine Skyway. None names a reputable outlet, so none is here.
Dexerto's prison claim. Dexerto's real-life page says Florida State Prison "is confirmed to appear," but it does not say who confirmed it. Rockstar names only Leonida Penitentiary, where Lucia served time. We left the pairing out.
County names from road signs. Outlets have read county names off signs and police cars in the trailers. None appears on a Rockstar page, and our fact base lists county names as unconfirmed, so we skip them.
Anything from leaks. Leaked footage and leaked maps are not used on this site, and neither is any match drawn from them.

Trivia

The Miami New Times read a Trailer 1 street sign for "Catalan Blvd" as a riff on Biscayne Boulevard: Biscayne comes from Spain's Bay of Biscay, and Catalan from another Spanish region.
The same paper pointed out that Trailer 1's clip of a woman twerking on a moving car echoes a real 2017 incident on the MacArthur Causeway that New Times itself reported.
In Trailer 2, the local pro football team is the Manatees. The Miami New Times joked that the city's real team had been renamed.
Game Informer's May 2025 regions piece noted sea turtles among the Keys' sights. For the full animal list, see GTA 6 wildlife and weather.

Sources and method

Rockstar's place names come from its Only in Leonida page and the Rockstar-written store copy in our fact base. Every real-world pairing is attributed to the outlet that made it, in an article we opened on Oct 14 2026, with its date. Hedges are kept as the outlet wrote them. No fan wikis, leaks or search summaries were used. Map size claims are covered, labeled, on our map page.