Leonida is not a real state. Almost everything in it is a real place.
Rockstar has never published a list of what it copied, and it never will — the studio does not annotate its own work. What follows is assembled from location identifications by Miami residents, community mapping and press analysis, with a confidence label on each one.
Every entry links to the exact spot on our interactive map, which runs on real Florida geography rather than game geography. That is the point of it: you can look at the actual coastline Rockstar redrew.
Vice City is Miami, specifically
Vice City, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
NINE 1 NINE → E11EVEN
The nightclub in Trailer 2 is E11EVEN, the 24-hour club at 29 NE 11th Street in downtown Miami. The naming joke survives translation: eleven becomes nine one nine, digits spelled out the same way.
Dexerto made the match on May 7, 2025, the day after the trailer.
Confidence: strong. The name construction alone is not a coincidence.
Ocean Drive
The Art Deco strip on Miami Beach, and the most obvious source in the game. Community analysis matched the Vice City night frames down to the streetlights.
The Clevelander hotel appears in a night pool scene, alongside a fictional hotel called the Dominion.
Confidence: strong.
Sahara Arena → the Kaseya Center
The arena, Ferris wheel and port cluster in downtown Miami repeat in the Sahara Arena frame — the same three elements in the same relationship to each other.
Confidence: strong.
Little Haiti
The mural reading Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité places one Trailer 2 scene in Miami’s Haitian district. Flag murals and Creole signage appear in the overpass frame, with an elevated train behind — a stand-in for Metrorail.
Confidence: strong. Miami New Times identified it.
Lummus Park
Jason lifting weights on the beach is Lummus Park in South Beach, where the outdoor gym has been a fixture for decades.
Confidence: strong.
The Miami Manatees
The local football team has been renamed. Miami New Times spotted it; nobody has confirmed which real team it replaces, though the geography does the work.
Confidence: it is on screen. What it satirises is inference.
Leonida Keys is the Florida Keys
Leonida Keys, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The Rusty Anchor → the Caribbean Club
The bar in Key Largo. The 1948 noir Key Largo was shot there, which makes it exactly the kind of layered reference Rockstar builds environments out of — a bar famous for a film about criminals in the Keys, reused for a game about criminals in the Keys.
Confidence: good.
Seven Mile Bridge
Part of the Overseas Highway, and the single most photographed structure in the Keys. Its analogue runs across the islands in the region’s key frame.
Trailer 2 also showed a sign for Keys Causeway, which is the confirmed connection between the mainland and the island chain.
Confidence: strong.
Grassrivers is the Everglades
Grassrivers, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The name is a direct translation of the concept — the Everglades is a river of grass, which is what Marjory Stoneman Douglas called it in 1947 in the book that saved it.
Everglades City
The stilt town at the edge of the swamp, with the same silhouette as the settlement in the Grassrivers frame.
Confidence: good.
Shark Valley
The Everglades gateway where the airboat tours run. The region’s frames show the same kind of boat crossing the same lilies.
Confidence: good.
Ambrosia is sugar country
Ambrosia, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Allied Crystal → the U.S. Sugar refinery
The refinery at Clewiston, on the southern shore of Lake Okeechobee, matches the Allied Crystal plant in the Ambrosia night frame.
Clewiston calls itself America’s Sweetest Town. Rockstar named its version Ambrosia, which is the food of the gods. The joke is doing several things at once.
Confidence: good.
Port Gellhorn is the Panhandle
Port Gellhorn, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
The community reads Panama City Beach as the prototype: cheap motels, abandoned attractions, empty malls, the Gulf coast after the money left.
Rockstar has named no real city, and this is a weaker match than the Miami identifications — it is a match of atmosphere rather than of specific buildings.
Confidence: moderate. Treat it as the best available reading, not a fact.
The name
Martha Gellhorn was a war correspondent, one of the first women to report from the front lines, and she lived in Florida. She was also married to Ernest Hemingway, who lived in Key West — which is inside the region Rockstar called Leonida Keys.
Naming a decaying Gulf port after her is the kind of thing Rockstar does and never explains.
Mount Kalaga has no mountain to copy
Mount Kalaga National Park, official screenshot. © Rockstar Games / Take-Two Interactive.
Florida’s highest point is Britton Hill at 345 feet, which is the lowest state high point in the United States. There is no mountain in Florida to base Mount Kalaga on.
The reading is that Rockstar drew on north Florida terrain and on Providence Canyon in Georgia — a canyon that exists because of nineteenth-century farming erosion, making it a landscape that looks ancient and is not.
Confidence: weak. This is the least documented region, and Rockstar has published six screenshots of it without naming anything real.
What this tells you about the map
Two things worth noticing.
The Miami identifications are precise — specific clubs, specific hotels, specific murals. The further from Vice City you go, the vaguer the matches become, until Mount Kalaga has no confirmed real analogue at all.
That is not sloppiness on the community’s part. It reflects how the game was built: Rockstar recreated Miami closely because everyone recognises Miami, and invented more freely everywhere else because nobody will check whether a Panhandle motel is the right Panhandle motel.
The second thing: the real distances do not survive. The Keys run over a hundred miles from Key Largo to Key West, and Clewiston sits roughly sixty miles inland from Palm Beach. Leonida compresses all of it. When you drive from Vice City to Mount Kalaga in the game you are crossing a distance that would take four hours in reality.
Our map keeps the real geography precisely so you can see the compression. Open the interactive map, switch on the real-world prototypes layer, and the shape of what Rockstar kept and what it threw away becomes visible in about ten seconds.
