Vice City is real and it's in Florida, these are GTA 6's real-life locations

Leonida is Rockstar's Florida: Vice City recreates Miami, the Leonida Keys are the Florida Keys and Grassrivers is the Everglades. The trailers and official screenshots are packed with places you can spot at a glance, from the Art Deco hotels of Ocean Drive to the bridges of the Keys. We tour the six confirmed regions, the real spots hiding in each one and the official images of every area.

What is the GTA 6 map based on?

Florida, just as Rockstar did with Miami in GTA: Vice City (2002). The difference is that this time it doesn't stop at the city: Leonida recreates the whole state on a smaller scale, with its big metropolis, its islands, its swamps, the forgotten Gulf Coast, the farming heartland and the northern forests. If you're after the size, it's all in our piece on how big the GTA 6 map is.

Vice City: Miami, from Ocean Drive to Wynwood

Rockstar sells Vice City as the city that sums up America's glamour, hustle and greed. It's present-day Miami, and the nods have been there since the first trailer:

• Ocean Drive and South Beach: neon-lit Art Deco hotels, sports cars and Miami Beach nightlife.
• Miami Beach's sands: white sand, umbrellas and the colourful lifeguard towers, one of the city's most famous postcards.
• The Kaseya Center and the Bayside Ferris wheel: the Miami Heat's arena and the marina's big wheel show up in the night-time views of downtown.
• Wynwood: the mural district, with walls and highway pillars painted from top to bottom.
• Brickell and the bay: waterfront skyscrapers, speedboats and the Panorama Tower, Miami's tallest building, on the skyline.

The first trailer went further and recreated viral Florida videos anyone who has spent time on social media will recognise: convenience-store brawls, out-of-control parties and the whole "Florida Man" lifestyle turned into parody, a series trademark.

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Leonida Keys: the Florida Keys

A tropical archipelago where life is easy and the bars are never empty: that's how Rockstar describes it, and that's the Florida Keys in a nutshell. It's also where Jason lives when the story begins.

• Bridges over the sea: the road hopping from island to island recalls the Seven Mile Bridge, and the first trailer features an old railway bridge in the style of Bahia Honda's.
• Key Largo: the waterfront homes with private docks in the second trailer match, according to the fans who tracked them down, real stretches of the Key Largo coast.
• The reef: diving among turtles and coral, just like on the only living coral barrier reef in the continental United States, which runs along the Keys.
• Boat parties on sandbars, Islamorada-style, and wooden dive bars like The Rusty Anchor.
• Iguanas everywhere, a very real detail: they're an invasive species Keys locals bump into every day.

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Grassrivers: the Everglades

Rockstar calls it the untameable jewel of Leonida, and the name itself is a nod: the Everglades have been known as the "River of Grass" since Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 book. In the game, as in real life, they start almost at the city's doorstep, with the Vice City skyline peeking over the mangroves.

There are airboats, chases across the water, stilt houses, seaplanes and, of course, alligators, which already starred in a few memorable moments in the first trailer.

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Port Gellhorn: the forgotten Gulf Coast

Cheap motels, shut-down attractions and empty strip malls that no longer pull anyone in: this is Leonida's forgotten coast, and the reference is clear. In Florida, the stretch of the Panhandle around Apalachicola is literally called the Forgotten Coast, far from the tourist crowds of Miami and Orlando.

The official images show a roadside motel with its neon sign, a strip club by the highway and trailer-home neighbourhoods at sunset. It's Leonida at its least glamorous.

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Ambrosia: Lake Okeechobee's sugar country

In the heart of Leonida, industry reigns, says Rockstar. Ambrosia revolves around a huge sugar refinery, just like Clewiston, the town on Lake Okeechobee that bills itself as "America's Sweetest Town" thanks to its sugar industry.

The picture is completed by a biker gang running the area, smokestacks and burning fields (in real Florida, sugarcane is burned before harvest) and 4×4 mud parties, hugely popular in the state's interior.

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Mount Kalaga National Park: the northern forests

Room to breathe, up north: Mount Kalaga is a national park on Leonida's northern border, with forests, red clay canyons, rivers and hills. Florida is famously flat, so Rockstar takes more liberties here: the reference is the state's northern woods and the area along the Georgia border.

It's the land of hunting, fishing, kayaking and dirt bikes, with deer and a cougar that brings to mind the Florida panther, the state's most iconic big cat.

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Where can you see all these places on the map?

Our interactive map of Leonida has all six regions with their descriptions. And if you want to go deeper, the fan project State of Leonida places hundreds of trailer shots next to the real Florida locations that inspired them.