GTA 6 real-life locations: the Miami and Florida behind Leonida

In short

• Leonida is Florida and Vice City is Miami: Rockstar says so. What Rockstar doesn’t say is which real building sits behind each building in the game.
• The gtadb.org community has done that work, matching official frames against real maps for years. Here are 24 of their finds, the most recognisable ones.
• Ocean Drive is copied almost hotel by hotel, downtown Vice City has the Heat’s arena and the tower that changes colour, and the Keys have the Key Largo bar that brags about a Bogart film.
• These are community matches, not Rockstar announcements: we only kept them when the place shows up in official material and gtadb doesn’t flag the match as uncertain.

Ocean Beach: Ocean Drive, hotel by hotel

Ocean Beach is South Beach, and its seafront, Shore Drive, is Ocean Drive. It is the most carefully copied stretch of Leonida: the Art Deco hotels sit in the same order as on the real street, with new names and the same silhouettes.

• Ocean View Hotel → Clevelander. Its neon sign is readable in an official frame with Jason in front of it, and it is the easiest match on the whole list: same white facade, same bar on the sidewalk.
• Dominion Hotel → Cardozo. One of the hotels at the northern end of the row, with the rounded corners typical of the style.
• Cortez Hotel → Colony Hotel. The Colony is the one with the big vertical neon sign, probably the most photographed spot on Ocean Drive.
• Cordelia → Park Central. Further south, a few steps from the Colony.
• Bobby Hurricane’s → 728 Ocean Drive. The building where the chainsaw scene of Scarface was shot in 1983, later home to a Johnny Rockets for years. In Vice City it becomes a joint with a hurricane in its name.

The Ocean View Hotel at night (© Rockstar Games) and the Clevelander by day (photo by P. Hughes, CC BY-SA 4.0). The game switches on the neon and wraps the palm trunks in lights; by day, on the real Ocean Drive, what’s left are the bar’s pink umbrellas.

The rest of Vice Beach

Away from the sand, Vice Beach follows Miami Beach even in its less famous buildings.

• Vice Museum of Art → The Bass. Miami Beach’s contemporary art museum, on Collins Avenue.
• Vice Beach Police Department → the Miami Beach Police headquarters, on Washington Avenue.
• Y Vice City → W South Beach. A luxury hotel further north along the beach, with the name playing on the letter.
• Diamond Dawgs → Sibbling Jewelers. The jewellery store from the motorcycle getaway in the Extended Look is on 41st Street in Miami Beach, the shopping street locals call Arthur Godfrey Road.

Diamond Dawgs in the Extended Look. © Rockstar Games.

Downtown Vice City

Downtown Miami is recognisable from its skyline, and gtadb has matched almost every tower. These are the ones with a story.

• Sahara Arena → Kaseya Center. The Miami Heat’s arena on the bay, with the same shell-like shape. The link has left the game: on November 18, the night before release, the Heat play as “Vice City”.
• Shoreline Market → Bayside Marketplace. The open-air mall on the water, next to the arena.
• Megamundo → One Biscayne Tower. The tower with the Megamundo sign at its base, at the start of Biscayne Boulevard.
• Heath Tower → Miami Tower. The tower that lights up in different colours at night: one of the symbols of the skyline.
• Galina Ballet Opera House → Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami’s opera and ballet house.
• Fleeca Field → loanDepot park. The Marlins’ ballpark, Miami’s baseball team, mocked with the name of one of the game’s banks.

The Megamundo sign in the Extended Look. © Rockstar Games.

Nightlife and Stockyard

• NINE1NINE → E11EVEN. Downtown Miami’s round-the-clock club. The game even keeps the idea of a number spelled with letters and digits.
• The Vault → Club Space, the other downtown institution, the one that closes well into the morning.
• Stock 305 and Electric Fang Tattoo → Wynwood. Stockyard, the neighbourhood Rockstar’s site describes through streetwear and tattoo parlours, is Miami’s mural district, and both storefronts sit on real Wynwood streets. 305 is Miami’s area code.

The Keys

In the Leonida Keys the real places are almost all on Key Largo, the island closest to the mainland.

• Brian’s Boat Works & Marina → Marina Club at Blackwater Sound. The boatyard from the Launch Trailer, the one belonging to Brian Heder, matches a Key Largo marina on Blackwater Sound.
• The Rusty Anchor → Caribbean Club. The seaside bar with the colourful picnic tables is the Caribbean Club, built in 1938. Its sign has claimed for decades to be the place where Key Largo, the 1948 film with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, was shot. It’s half a legend: the film was made almost entirely on a Hollywood soundstage, but the director and the screenwriter really did stay there while reworking the script.
• The blimp → Fat Albert. The white tethered balloon seen in an official frame is, according to gtadb, the radar balloon at Cudjoe Key, which watches the straits towards Cuba and which everyone in the Keys calls Fat Albert.

The Rusty Anchor in the game (© Rockstar Games) and the Caribbean Club around 1950 (State Library and Archives of Florida, public domain). The roadside sign already said “This is it” back then.

Inland and Port Gellhorn

• The Allied Crystal sugar mill → U.S. Sugar’s mill in Clewiston. Ambrosia is built around sugar, and its model is Clewiston, the town on the shore of Lake Okeechobee that calls itself “America’s Sweetest Town”. The smokestacks in the official sunset frame are those.
• Sara’s Unisex Salon → Krome Avenue, Homestead. The salon seen in an official screenshot sits, according to gtadb, on the main street of historic downtown Homestead, the farming town south of Miami.
• Pawn & Gun → Panama City. Port Gellhorn comes from the Panhandle, Florida’s north-western strip, and the shops seen in the trailers stand on Highway 98 between Panama City and Callaway.

Why they look so alike

Rockstar has always built its cities from real places, but with GTA 6 the method shows more. Ocean Drive doesn’t just have the right hotels: it has the right order, the right spacing between one sign and the next. The further you get from the beach, the more the map compresses and mixes: Leonida puts on a single map places that are hours apart by car in Florida, like Key Largo, Clewiston and Panama City.

For the names of the areas there’s our guide to Leonida’s geography, and for the Launch Trailer scene by scene there’s the one on the Launch Trailer locations. The comparison with the 2002 Vice City is in Vice City 2002 vs Leonida.

All the others

We picked 24 here. The gtadb community has identified more than 250 with a confident match, from gas stations to Metromover stops: they’re all on the gtadb.org map, which shows the game frame and a photo of the real place for each point.

Frequently asked questions

Is GTA 6 set in Miami?

In a fictional version of it. Leonida is GTA 6’s Florida-inspired state and Vice City is its Miami, with neighbourhoods, beaches and towers that follow the real ones under other names.

Who found the real-life locations of GTA 6?

The gtadb.org community, which compares official frames and screenshots with the real Florida and publishes the results under a free licence. Rockstar has never confirmed the individual matches.

Is Ocean Drive in GTA 6?

Yes, as Shore Drive, in the Ocean Beach neighbourhood. The Art Deco hotels have new names but sit in the same order as on the real street: the Clevelander becomes the Ocean View Hotel, the Colony becomes the Cortez.

Will you be able to visit these places in the game?

We’ll know from November 19. Some nightclubs already appear from the inside in the trailers, but which buildings will actually be enterable is something only the game will tell.