When Rockstar Games released the first and second trailers for Grand Theft Auto VI, the fictional state of Leonida ceased to be a rumour and became a confirmed open-world setting structured, much like real-world Florida, around a series of administrative counties. Five of these counties have so far been confirmed through trailer signage, official screenshots, and on-vehicle livery details: Vice-Dale County, Kelly County, Leonard County, Mariana County, and Ambrosia County. Each of these counties has been mapped, by community researchers and trade press alike, onto a recognisable Floridian analogue, and each appears to house a distinct geographic and cultural slice of the southern United States. This report compiles what is presently confirmed about each county, examines the real-world inspirations identified by reputable wikis and journalistic outlets, and concludes with a comparative discussion of how the five counties function as the spatial skeleton of Leonida.
Vice-Dale County is the most prominently teased of Leonida's administrative subdivisions, since it contains Vice City itself along with the bulk of the urban neighbourhoods previewed in both trailers. According to the GTA Wiki navigation template for Grand Theft Auto VI neighbourhoods, Vice-Dale encompasses the metropolitan core (Downtown Vice City, Little Cuba, La Perle, Belville, Crosstown, Ekanfinaka, Peacock Bay, Rockridge, Southside, Stockyard, Tequesta and Tisha-Wocka), the Vice Beach district (Ocean Beach, Washington Beach and Leaf Links), the artificial port and bay islands, the rural community of Hamlet, and the Leonida Penitentiary (GTA Wiki, 2026a). The compound name "Vice-Dale" is widely read as a portmanteau of Miami-Dade and Fort Lauderdale, with the county serving as the analogue of Miami-Dade County in southern Florida (Wakeling, 2025). Game Informer's cover story on the trailer reveal noted that the urban segment is "denser, more vertical, and more chaotic than any prior GTA city", and that the surrounding county appears to absorb the suburban sprawl typically associated with Hialeah and Coral Gables (Reiner, 2024). Vice-Dale thus functions as Leonida's economic and narrative gravitational centre.
Kelly County lies to the west of Vice-Dale and is visible in the first trailer on westbound Interstate 404 signage, with further signs in Port Gellhorn pointing back toward Vice-Dale (GTA Wiki, 2026b). The county is confirmed to contain the city of Port Gellhorn, the Gellhorn International Raceway, Draper Island, and an as-yet-unnamed prison complex on its outskirts. The GTA Wiki notes that Kelly County is "primarily inspired by both Collier County and Lee County in Southwest Florida, particularly in its geographic placement and its name, whose pronunciation combines elements of both" (GTA Wiki, 2026b). GamesRadar's map-decoding feature on the second trailer further suggested that Port Gellhorn is modelled on a composite of Fort Myers and Naples, complete with marina-side mid-rise development and a major motorsport venue echoing Sebring (Loveridge, 2025). Kelly County, then, represents the Gulf-coast western frontier of the playable map.
Leonard County occupies the south-eastern portion of Leonida, immediately north of Vice-Dale, and is portrayed in the first trailer through a now-famous sequence of Leonard County Sheriff vehicles at an Arrow gas station in the town of Waning Sands (GTA Wiki, 2026c). The GTA Wiki describes the county as "mostly suburban" and notes that the Leonard County Sheriff liveries are "nearly identical to the liveries used by the Broward County Sheriff's Office", with the county name itself appearing to derive from Napoleon B. Broward, the early-twentieth-century Governor of Florida for whom the real Broward County was named (GTA Wiki, 2026c). The implication, supported by trade-press analysis, is that Leonard County is the fictionalised Broward County, covering territory analogous to Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood and Pompano Beach (Reiner, 2024). It supplies the connective suburban tissue between the metropolis and the desert-edge interior.
Mariana County, confirmed on an Interstate 404 sign in the second trailer at the 2:28 timestamp, occupies the southern reach of Leonida and encompasses the Grassrivers wetland region, the township of Watson Bay, and the Leonida Keys archipelago (which itself includes East Key and Key Lento) (GTA Wiki, 2026d). The wiki identifies the county as "likely based on Monroe County, Florida", the real-world jurisdiction that contains the Florida Keys and most of Everglades National Park. Several outlets including GamesRadar have observed that the Grassrivers region appears to translate the Everglades into a fully traversable swamp biome, complete with airboats glimpsed in promotional material, while the Keys component supplies a tropical island-chain counterpart that echoes long-standing fan demand for a Florida-Keys-style playground (Loveridge, 2025). Mariana County therefore covers Leonida's wildest natural ecology and its most tourist-coded island landscape simultaneously.
Ambrosia County is positioned in the central interior of Leonida and was first confirmed through an official Rockstar screenshot showing a road sign for the Ambrosia County Sheriff's Office in the city of Ambrosia, with Lake Leonida sitting within its borders (GTA Wiki, 2026e). The wiki traces its inspiration to Hendry County, Florida, "due to its largest city, Clewiston, serving as the basis for the city of Ambrosia", with potential additional influence from Glades County and Highlands County, both of which border the real Lake Okeechobee. The same article observes that the word "ambrosia", meaning the food of the gods, may obliquely reference Clewiston's identity as a sugar-industry town. Ambrosia County thus stands as the agricultural and lacustrine heartland of Leonida, providing a thematic and visual counterweight to Vice-Dale's concrete-and-neon skyline.
Considered together, the five confirmed counties form a deliberate ring around the Vice City metropolis. Vice-Dale County (Miami-Dade) anchors the south-east; Kelly County (Collier and Lee) anchors the south-west; Leonard County (Broward) bridges the urban core northward toward the suburban interior; Mariana County (Monroe) extends south through the wetlands and out into the keys; and Ambrosia County (Hendry, with Glades/Highlands flavouring) occupies the agricultural interior around Lake Leonida (GTA Wiki, 2026a; 2026b; 2026c; 2026d; 2026e). This pentagonal arrangement gives Rockstar a way to deliver tonal variety, urban density in Vice-Dale, motorsport and coastal commerce in Kelly, suburban sheriff-belt Americana in Leonard, swamp-and-island ecotourism in Mariana, and rural sugar-belt sleaze in Ambrosia, without ever forcing the player to leave the contiguous map. Trade-press coverage has consistently framed this structure as the most ambitious regional simulation in the series' history, surpassing the Los Santos / Blaine County binary of Grand Theft Auto V (Reiner, 2024; Loveridge, 2025). It is worth stressing that further counties almost certainly remain unannounced: GTA Wiki maintains a placeholder entry titled "Unnamed GTA VI northern Leonida county" covering Mount Kalaga National Park, Domed Hills and Yorktown (GTA Wiki, 2026a), and several named neighbourhoods including Bohemia, North Beaches, Redhill and Sundown have yet to be assigned to a confirmed county. The five outlined above should therefore be read as the confirmed core of an architecture that is still expanding ahead of the game's 2026 release.
The five confirmed counties of Leonida, Vice-Dale, Kelly, Leonard, Mariana and Ambrosia, collectively translate the geography of southern and central Florida into the satirical idiom of the Grand Theft Auto series. Each has been confirmed through a combination of trailer signage, official screenshots and law-enforcement liveries, and each has been mapped by community researchers and reviewed by trade press onto a specific real-world analogue. Vice-Dale supplies the metropolis, Kelly the Gulf coast, Leonard the suburban sheriff belt, Mariana the swamps and keys, and Ambrosia the agricultural interior. Until Rockstar discloses further administrative divisions, these five counties remain the spatial vocabulary through which Leonida should be understood, and they collectively confirm that Grand Theft Auto VI is engineered around regional diversity rather than a single urban core.