What real places is the GTA 6 map based on?
Universally read as Florida, and never stated. Rockstar has named no real place as a source for anything in Leonida, so every identification of a real counterpart is a reader’s inference.
Rumoured. Source: Wikipedia (Grand Theft Auto VI), 18 Aug 2026. Checked .
The Florida reading is drawn from the geography and the culture the trailers show, and it is repeated so uniformly by press and by fans that it is usually printed without qualification. Repetition is not confirmation, so it is graded as an inference here.
The reading, and what it is a reading of
Leonida is understood to be modelled on Florida, but Rockstar has never said so. Rumoured. Wikipedia (Grand Theft Auto VI), .
A fictional US state is as far as first-party material goes. No real US state is named beside it, no real city and no real landmark.
The game is set in the fictional US state of Leonida. Confirmed. PlayStation.Blog (Rockstar-authored), .
The neighbourhood-level identifications — this stretch of seafront is that one, this island is that one — have no first-party basis at all. They are read off the trailers, and there is not much trailer to read.
Rockstar published around 70 screenshots and new character and location pages alongside Trailer 2. Confirmed. GTABase, .
The corpus almost every frame-level identification is worked from is that seventy-odd still images plus the location pages, and Rockstar captioned none of them with a real place name. An identification made from a still is a reading of a picture, and a good reading of a picture is still a reading — see what Trailer 2 actually showed.
What is it drawn from?
Rockstar has not identified any district, street or landmark in Vice City with a real place, and has never published a list of real-world sources for the map. Not known. Open since ; statements to cite: Six place descriptions, each a phrase long, and not one real place name among them. Would settle it: Rockstar naming a real place — a city, a landmark, a stretch of coast — as a source for anything in Leonida. Absence of any first-party statement.
Rockstar published a location page for each named place alongside Trailer 2, each with its own short description. Not one of them names a real-world counterpart, and no first-party material since has either. That is not an oversight in a small body of work; it is the entire body of work, and the identification is absent from all of it.
What readers have concluded, and what it rests on
The first two columns below are Rockstar's: the name it published and the phrase it gave that name, from the location pages of 6 May 2025 and, for Vice City, from the first trailer of 4 December 2023. The third is a reader's, and the fourth says what a reader's column is worth.
| Named place | How Rockstar describes it | Commonly said to be | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vice City | The principal city of the state | Miami | Inference — not confirmed. Name from Rockstar Games Trailer 1, . |
| Leonida Keys | A tropical archipelago | The Florida Keys | Inference — not confirmed. Name from Rockstar Games material published with Trailer 2 (via GTABase), . |
| Grassrivers | A primordial wetland expanse | The Everglades | Inference — not confirmed. Name from Rockstar Games material published with Trailer 2 (via GTABase), . |
| Port Gellhorn | The forgotten coast of Leonida | A Gulf-coast town on the Florida panhandle | Inference — not confirmed. Name from Rockstar Games material published with Trailer 2 (via GTABase), . |
| Ambrosia | The heart of Leonida | None recorded here | Inference — not confirmed. Name from Rockstar Games material published with Trailer 2 (via GTABase), . |
| Mount Kalaga National Park | A national park | None recorded here | Inference — not confirmed. Name from Rockstar Games material published with Trailer 2 (via GTABase), . |
Nothing in that third column has moved since Trailer 2, because nothing first-party has been published that could move it. Two of the six rows carry no identification at all: nobody has settled on a real place for Ambrosia or for Mount Kalaga National Park, and an invented counterpart would be worth less than the blank.
Vice City returns as the game's principal city. Confirmed. Rockstar Games Trailer 1, .
A seventh first-party name exists — Leonida Penitentiary, named in Lucia's bio rather than on a location page — and it is on the register of named places with the rest. It is left out of the table because a prison named in a character bio carries no description to identify anything against.
Identification is not confirmation
A place is confirmed when first-party material names it, which is true of exactly the names in the first column above. An identification with a real place is graded rumoured however obvious it looks, because obviousness is not a source. Nothing is upgraded by being repeated, by appearing in a news article, or by being drawn on a community map. The full rule is on how we grade a claim and the source policy.
It is entirely possible that every identification above is correct. That would still not make any of them confirmed: what Rockstar published and what a reader concluded are two different things, however well the two agree.
A second wave of identifications dates from August 2026 and is worked from an image said to be the Leonida map.
On 18 August 2026 a group calling itself CyberLeek posted material it claimed came from Grand Theft Auto VI, including footage and an image said to be the Leonida map. Rumoured. GameSpot, .
Material whose origin cannot be established is not evidence for what a place is taken from, however interesting it is, and no name in the table above rests on any of it. What that episode is and is not worth is set out on the August 2026 leaks, the separate question of how large the map is has its own page, and what is actually known about the city is on the Vice City page.
Sources
- GTA 6 Trailer 2 Is Out Now Carries the location pages Rockstar published with Trailer 2 and their one-line descriptions — the source of every officially named place, and cited for an absence: not one of those descriptions names a real-world counterpart.
- Grand Theft Auto VI plays best on PS5, November 19 Names Leonida and Vice City. Names no real place.
- Grand Theft Auto VI trailer
- Grand Theft Auto VI Cited for the fact that the Florida reading is universal, not for the reading itself.
- Apparent GTA 6 footage and map leak as Rockstar issues takedowns