The Grassrivers is the GTA VI re-imagining of the Florida Everglades — a sprawling natural region of flooded grasslands in the State of Leonida, running through Vice-Dale County and Mariana County (GTA Wiki, 2026). Its name pays direct homage to Marjory Stoneman Douglas's 1947 work The Everglades: River of Grass, and Rockstar's promotional material frames it as "the untamable jewel of Leonida's crown," warning players that "there are far deadlier predators and weirder discoveries among the mangroves" than the gators (Rockstar Games, 2025). For a series whose criminal vocabulary has long depended on the lawless geography of South Florida — first through Vice City (2002) and now GTA VI — the wetland is more than scenery: it is a logistical network of waterborne back-doors. This report covers the real-world smuggling history that shapes player expectations and the inferred in-game smuggling corridors the Grassrivers will enable at launch.
The Everglades have functioned as a contraband conduit for more than a century because the same hydrological features that frustrated agricultural drainage — a 60-mile-wide, 100-mile-long sheetflow of shallow water creeping at roughly half a mile per day across a porous limestone shelf (Douglas, 1947; McCally, 1999) — also frustrate law enforcement. The terrain is too shallow for Coast Guard cutters, too dense with sawgrass and mangrove for road interdiction, and riddled with thousands of tree-island hammocks ideal for caching cargo. The Seminole, retreating into the interior during the Seminole Wars, exploited exactly these features to resist removal by the U.S. Army (Grunwald, 2006), establishing a template of evasion that later criminal economies would inherit.
The first industrial-scale smuggling boom arrived with Prohibition (1920–1933). Captain William S. McCoy pioneered the "Rum Row" model, anchoring large schooners just beyond the three-mile (later twelve-mile) U.S. territorial limit and transferring Caribbean rum, Canadian whisky, and European spirits to fast contact boats — frequently piloted by local figures such as "Habana Joe" — that scattered into the mangrove creeks of South Florida, including the western Everglades fringe and the Ten Thousand Islands (Willoughby, 2001; Carse, 1959). Ships from Bimini fed Florida speakeasies, and shallow-draft skiffs could "dock in any small river or eddy and transfer their cargo to a waiting truck" (Wikipedia, 2025a), a phrase that essentially describes the Grassrivers gameplay loop.
The Cocaine Cowboys era (late 1970s–mid 1980s) transformed the same routes for the Medellín and Cali cartels. Everglades City and Chokoloskee — once stone-crab fishing villages — became hubs of "square grouper" marijuana and cocaine offloads, culminating in Operation Everglades (1983–84), in which federal indictments swept up a significant portion of the adult male population of Everglades City for smuggling (Andreas, 2013; Sayre, 2014). Cigarette boats, modified airboats, and clandestine airstrips cut into the sawgrass formed a triphibian (sea–air–swamp) network whose visual grammar — neon-lit speedboats, pastel suits, low-flying twin-engine Cessnas — is the direct aesthetic ancestor of the GTA VI trailers.
Contemporary smuggling has shifted toward exotic wildlife (pythons, orchids, sea turtle eggs), narcotics via "panga" boats from the Bahamas, and human trafficking through Florida Bay — patterns documented by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service prosecutions and CBP Air and Marine Operations reports (Reuter, 2014).
Although Rockstar has not published a smuggling map, three converging signals — the leaked September 2022 development build, the Trailer 1 (2023) airboat shot, and the May 2025 promotional postcards (GTA Wiki, 2026) — allow strong inferences:
The 3D-Universe Vice City precedent — and the GTA IV Craplist reference to a crocodile smuggled out of Vice City's wetland border to Liberty City (GTA Wiki, 2026) — confirms Rockstar's intent to lean into the wildlife-trafficking subgenre alongside narcotics.
Expect mission verbs drawn directly from this history: airboat chases through sawgrass channels, night offloads under Coast Guard helicopter spotlights, hammock-based stash hunts, alligator and python encounters during failed extractions, and corrupt Park Ranger or Fish & Wildlife NPCs echoing the Operation Everglades-era complicity of local officials.