The Leonida Keys, the tropical archipelago strung off the southern coast of Mariana County in Grand Theft Auto VI, function as the in-game counterpart to Florida's real-world Florida Keys. Central to both the geographic identity and the playable navigation of this region is the bridge and causeway infrastructure that threads each island into a continuous overland chain. Promotional material released by Rockstar Games describes the Keys as a "gateway to paradise" reached via an elongated causeway from Vice-Dale County, mirroring the Overseas Highway that carries U.S. Route 1 through Monroe County, Florida, to Key West (GTA Wiki, 2025; Wikipedia, 2025a). The bridge system is therefore not merely scenery; it is the spine of the southern map, the only fixed route between the mainland and the outer cays, and a stage for set-piece encounters with weather, traffic and police pursuit.
The most recognisable bridge along the Overseas Highway is the Seven Mile Bridge, which links Knight's Key in Marathon to Little Duck Key in the Lower Keys. The original span, completed between 1909 and 1912 under Henry Flagler's direction as part of the Florida East Coast Railway's Key West Extension, was converted to vehicular use following the catastrophic 1935 Labor Day Hurricane (Wikipedia, 2025b). A modern replacement, designed by Figg & Muller Engineers and constructed from precast, prestressed concrete segmental box girders, opened on 24 May 1982. It comprises 440 spans, stretches 35,862 ft (10.93 km), rises to a 65 ft navigational clearance over Moser Channel and cost approximately US$45 million (Wikipedia, 2025b). The Overseas Highway itself runs roughly 106.5 miles from Key West to the Miami-Dade county line, with much of its alignment laid atop the former Flagler railbed acquired by the State of Florida for $640,000 after the 1935 disaster (Wikipedia, 2025a). The Bahia Honda Rail Bridge, a truss structure retrofitted with a concrete deck atop its trusses, and the Long Key and Jewfish Creek bridges round out the historic spans that GTA VI's designers have referenced.
In Grand Theft Auto VI, the Keys Causeway is the principal arterial connecting southern Vice-Dale County to the Leonida Keys, arcing south-southwest before bending westward through the archipelago (GTA Wiki, 2025). It is the analogue of U.S. Route 1's overseas section, providing the player with a single elongated stretch of asphalt punctuated by long-span bridges over open water. Among the structures already catalogued on the GTA Wiki are an unnamed Bahia Honda-inspired rail bridge and an unnamed "New Bahia Honda"-inspired road bridge, both visible in the first official trailer and in promotional postcards published on Rockstar's GTA VI website (GTA Wiki, 2025). Their juxtaposition—a derelict, truss-form historic span sitting alongside a sleeker, modern concrete replacement—replicates exactly the visual coupling that tourists encounter at Bahia Honda and Seven Mile in Monroe County, where the older bridge survives as a pedestrian and fishing pier next to its newer counterpart (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The Seven Mile Bridge has long featured in cinema, including Licence to Kill, True Lies and 2 Fast 2 Furious, the last of which depicted an aerial vehicular jump from its severed eastern approach. True Lies notably blew up an 80 ft scale model off Sugarloaf Key rather than the real bridge (Wikipedia, 2025a; Wikipedia, 2025b). Rockstar's decision to model the Leonida Keys causeway on this stretch leverages that cinematic vocabulary, offering players the same opportunities for high-speed chases over turquoise water, jumps across gaps in the abandoned rail-era span, and hurricane-tossed set-pieces. The wiki notes that Hurricane Roxy is implied to have struck the region prior to the game's events, presaging storm damage to the causeway and its bridges (GTA Wiki, 2025), echoing the historical impacts of the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, Hurricane Donna in 1960 and Hurricane Irma in 2017.
As both a navigational backbone and a narrative motif, the Leonida Keys bridge system condenses a century of Floridian engineering history—from Flagler's audacious oversea railroad to FDOT's modern precast viaducts—into an interactive coastal corridor. The causeway anchors the southernmost extremity of the GTA VI map, defining isolation, escape and vulnerability in equal measure.
GTA Wiki (2025) Leonida Keys. Available at: https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Leonida_Keys (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025a) Overseas Highway. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Highway (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Seven Mile Bridge. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Mile_Bridge (Accessed: 14 May 2026).