Grand Theft Auto VI is set in the State of Leonida, a fictional state covering much of the American South. The last time a mainline GTA game stretched across a full state was San Andreas in 2004. Every game since has anchored on a single city: Liberty City in GTA IV, Los Santos and its surrounding county in GTA V. Leonida breaks that pattern, returning to a wider geographic scope after more than twenty years.

What Rockstar has shown so far is a state with six distinct regions. Vice City sits at the urban heart, a reimagined Miami returning to the franchise for the first time since 2002. Around it: tropical island chains, swamp wetlands, faded coastal towns, industrial farmland, and northern wilderness. Each one has its own pace and its own tone.

The Florida-but-not-Florida question

Leonida is fictional, but its geography mirrors Florida’s. A long peninsula stretching south, a tropical island chain off the southern coast, swamps in the interior, and a northern border that runs into hill country. Anyone familiar with Florida will recognize it immediately.

Mount Kalaga National Park, Leonida’s wilderness region, draws as much from northern Florida and Georgia as it does from the peninsula. The Allied Crystal sugar refinery in Ambrosia evokes inland Florida agriculture but isn’t tied to a specific real-world equivalent. Rockstar took the broad shape of the state, blended in parts of Georgia, and built something with more geographic variety than Florida alone would offer.

The state’s name is pronounced “lay-oh-NYE-duh,” not like Florida. The name may be a reference to Juan Ponce de León, the Spanish conquistador who named Florida in 1513.

Earlier GTA games referenced Florida directly. Within GTA’s HD Universe, Leonida now replaces it as the state where this story takes place.

Vice City as the centerpiece

Vice City is the centerpiece of Leonida and the setting of GTA 6’s main story.

The city has been part of the GTA franchise since 2002, when the game that bears its name became one of the series’ best-known entries. Players have not walked its streets as a playable setting in over twenty years. Its return is one of the most-anticipated parts of GTA 6, and both official trailers have shown extensive Vice City footage.

Rockstar’s official tagline for the city is “Everything in Excess.” The description that follows leans into Vice City’s character as a place where American glamour and hustle concentrate in one location. Pastel art deco hotels and white sands at Ocean Beach. Little Cuba with its panaderías. The Tisha-Wocka flea market and its bootleg brands. The VC Port at the city’s edge, which Rockstar calls “the cruise ship capital of the world.”

Within Leonida, Vice City is one of six regions. But it’s the one that anchors everything else.

The five other regions

The Leonida Keys

Tagline: “Gateway to Paradise.”

The Leonida Keys are a tropical archipelago off the state’s southern coast, drawn from the Florida Keys. Rockstar’s description leans casual: the dress code is loose, the bars are loaded, life is easy. Deck chairs and beach buzz. But the closing image is sharper. The Keys sit “on the doorstep of some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America.” The peace is real, but so is the threat.

This is also Jason’s home base. The Keys’ isolation from Vice City and easy water access make them a natural fit for the kind of work he does.

The Grassrivers

Tagline: “Welcome to the Wetlands.”

The Grassrivers is Leonida’s swamp region, drawn from the Everglades. Rockstar calls it “the untamable jewel of Leonida’s crown.” The description gets specific about what the swamp contains: alligators on the surface, “far deadlier predators” beneath, and “weirder discoveries” among the mangroves.

Port Gellhorn

Tagline: “Live Hard.”

Port Gellhorn sits on Leonida’s northwest coast, a former tourist destination now defined by what’s left after the tourists stopped coming. Rockstar’s description is the most evocative of the six regions. The town runs on “malt liquor, painkillers, and truck stop energy drinks.” Cheap motels and shut-down attractions. A new economy built on the kinds of vices that fill the vacuum when tourism dies.

The instruction “jump on a dirt bike and hold onto your wallet” tells you what kind of place this is. Port Gellhorn is GTA’s eye on the parts of America that have been left behind, rendered without sentimentality.

Port Gellhorn is GTA's eye on the parts of America that have been left behind, rendered without sentimentality.

Ambrosia

Tagline: “Keeping Leonida Sweet.”

Ambrosia is central Leonida: industrial, rural, agricultural. Rockstar describes it as the part of the state where “American industry and old school values still reign supreme.” The Allied Crystal sugar refinery provides legitimate jobs; the local biker gang provides everything else. The tagline plays on sugar’s role in the regional economy and on the criminal undertone of “keeping things sweet.”

This is the region that feels furthest from Vice City’s neon. Where the city is excess, Ambrosia is endurance. Where the Keys are leisure, Ambrosia is labor.

Mount Kalaga National Park

Tagline: “Wild, Wild Country.”

Mount Kalaga sits at Leonida’s top edge and draws from the terrain of northern Florida and Georgia. Rockstar describes it as “room to breathe on the state’s northern fringes.” The park offers hunting, fishing, and off-road trails. But the description doesn’t stop at recreation. The surrounding backwoods, Rockstar notes, are home to “hillbilly mystics and paranoid radicals” who live “far from the prying eyes of the government.”

What’s confirmed and what isn’t

Rockstar has officially named six regions of Leonida and published a description for each. That’s the foundation of what’s been confirmed about the state’s geography. Everything outside those six regional descriptions is either unconfirmed or community-derived.

A few specific items worth labeling:

County names. Trailers and screenshots have shown signage for counties named Vice-Dale, Leonard, Kelly, Ambrosia, and Mariana. Players and the GTA mapping community have catalogued these from official footage. Rockstar has not published an official county-level breakdown of Leonida or confirmed that these are the only counties.

Map size. Estimates that Leonida is twice the size of GTA V are community calculations based on trailer footage and screenshot analysis. Rockstar has not published a size comparison.

Real-world equivalents. The mappings used in this article (Vice City to Miami, Grassrivers to Everglades, Mount Kalaga to northern Florida and Georgia, and so on) are widely accepted but not officially confirmed by Rockstar in those exact terms. Rockstar has framed Leonida as drawing from Florida with Georgia influences, but has not published a specific real-world mapping for each region.

Whether these are all the regions. The six regions Rockstar has described may not be a complete list. Additional regions, neighborhoods, or sub-areas could exist within Leonida that haven’t been revealed yet. More material is expected as the summer marketing campaign rolls out.

Closing

Leonida is the largest piece of GTA news Rockstar has revealed. The rest of what they’ve built will become visible when the game launches in November.