The Leonida Keys, the southernmost portion of the fictional U.S. state of Leonida in Grand Theft Auto VI, are Rockstar Games' satirical reimagining of the Florida Keys archipelago (Wikipedia, 2025a). According to Rockstar's official setting descriptions and the second trailer released in May 2025, the Keys form one of six headline regions of the game's open world, sitting alongside Vice City, Grassrivers, Ambrosia, Mount Kalaga National Park, and Port Gellhorn (Wikipedia, 2025a). The region's tourist towns are explicit pastiches of the Overseas Highway corridor that stretches roughly 120 miles from Key Largo down to Key West — a sun-bleached string of cays famous worldwide for pastel Conch Republic architecture, sportfishing charters, diving on the Florida Reef, and a libertine bar-crawl culture centred on Duval Street (Wikipedia, 2025b; Wikipedia, 2025c).
To understand what Rockstar is parodying, the source geography matters. The Florida Keys are a coral cay archipelago of roughly 137 square miles, beginning about 15 miles south of Miami and arcing south-southwest to Key West and beyond to the uninhabited Dry Tortugas (Wikipedia, 2025b). The chain is traversed by a single two-lane road — U.S. Highway 1, the Overseas Highway — built atop Henry Flagler's hurricane-shattered Overseas Railway after the catastrophic 1935 Labor Day hurricane (Wikipedia, 2025b). The principal tourist nodes along this corridor are:
Key West in particular is the dominant cultural template. Its 4.2-square-mile island packs in Duval Street (a 14-block crawl from Gulf to Atlantic), the Southernmost Point Buoy, Hemingway's house, Truman's Little White House, and the self-declared "Conch Republic" — a 1982 secessionist publicity stunt born from a U.S. Border Patrol roadblock that throttled tourism (Wikipedia, 2025c). The city's motto, "One Human Family," reflects a long-standing LGBT-friendly, Cuban-Bahamian "Conch" identity that distinguishes it sharply from mainland Florida (Wikipedia, 2025c).
Rockstar's published material confirms the Leonida Keys are home territory for one of the two protagonists, Jason Duval, an ex-Army drug runner working under his landlord Brian Heder, "a longtime drug runner in the Keys" (Wikipedia, 2025a). Trailer 1 (December 2023) and Trailer 2 (May 2025) showcase the region's tourist-town texture: stilt houses, tiki bars, bait shacks, shrimp boats, drunken Spring Breakers, mobility-scooter retirees, alligator-wrestling roadside attractions, and the long ribbon of causeway bridges — clear analogues to the Seven Mile Bridge and Bahia Honda crossings (Wikipedia, 2025a). The game leans hard into "Florida Man" iconography, satirising modern American tourist culture, social-media influencers, and small-town policing in equal measure (Wikipedia, 2025a).
The settled Keys towns appear to function in-game as a low-density, sun-drenched counterpoint to the neon density of Vice City, mirroring the way real Key West sits 130 miles by air — but a four-hour drive — from Miami (Wikipedia, 2025c). Expect honky-tonk strips that echo Duval Street, marina districts modelled on Key West Bight and Islamorada's Bud n' Mary's, dive-shop towns evoking Key Largo, and isolated stilt-house communities reminiscent of Big Pine and Cudjoe Keys, the latter being where Hurricane Irma made its devastating 2017 landfall (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The economic logic of real Keys tourist towns — cruise-ship port calls, sportfishing charters, scuba operators, key-lime-pie kitsch retail, and a service economy dependent on seasonal Northern visitors — provides Rockstar with rich material for both gameplay and satire (Wikipedia, 2025c). The Keys' tropical savanna climate (Köppen Aw), with a hot wet season from June to October and a sunny dry winter that drives peak tourism, also shapes the game's signature visual palette: golden-hour palms, afternoon thunderheads, and hurricane-evacuation iconography (Wikipedia, 2025b). Brian Heder's smuggling operation and Jason's drug-running backstory plug directly into the Keys' real and mythologised history as a contraband corridor between Cuba (95 miles south of Key West) and the U.S. mainland — a smuggling tradition stretching from Prohibition rum-runners through 1980s cocaine cowboys (Wikipedia, 2025c).
The Leonida Keys tourist towns are Rockstar's most location-specific parody since Vice City itself, drawing on a tightly bounded real-world chain whose every mile marker carries cultural baggage. By centring Jason's storyline here, GTA VI gives the Keys narrative weight that prior games reserved for marquee cities, allowing the studio to satirise both the postcard-perfect tourist economy of Key West and Key Largo and the seedier drug-running underbelly that has long coexisted with it.
Wikipedia (2025a) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Florida Keys. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Keys (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025c) Key West. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_West (Accessed: 14 May 2026).