The Leonida Keys, the in-game analogue of the real-world Florida Keys, are an archipelago of tropical islands extending off the southern coast of the State of Leonida in Mariana County, forming the southernmost reach of the continental United States within Grand Theft Auto VI (Rockstar Games, 2025). Officially marketed by Rockstar as the "Gateway to Paradise" — a sun-drenched chain where "the dress code is casual, the bars are loaded" — the Keys are simultaneously framed in promotional material as bordering "some of the most beautiful and dangerous waters in all of America" (Rockstar Games, 2025). That deliberate juxtaposition between leisure and lawlessness is no marketing accident. It is a direct narrative inheritance from the documented role of the Florida Keys as one of the most significant maritime drug-smuggling corridors in twentieth-century American history, a legacy that the Rockstar design team has woven into the geography, missions, and ambient world-building of Vice City's second great installment.
The Florida Keys' geography — a 220-kilometre arc of coral cays stretching from Key Largo to Key West, only ninety miles north of Cuba and directly athwart the Florida Straits between the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico — made the archipelago an almost predetermined smuggling route. From the rum-running of the Prohibition era through the marijuana "square grouper" booms of the late 1960s and 1970s, and culminating in the cocaine deluge of the 1980s, the Keys functioned as the maritime "last mile" of Caribbean trafficking networks supplying the United States (Crandall, 2020). By 1981, Miami and its outlying island chain were responsible for trafficking an estimated 70 per cent of the cocaine and 70 per cent of the marijuana entering the United States, with small go-fast boats, fishing trawlers, and low-flying aircraft running product up the Keys and into the Everglades for onward distribution (Alvarado, 2011; Cody, 1983).
The corridor's geography was so notorious that in April 1982 the U.S. Border Patrol established a roadblock at Florida City on U.S. Highway 1 — the single artery connecting the Keys to the mainland — to search every northbound vehicle for narcotics and undocumented migrants. The economic damage was so severe that Key West's mayor and city council retaliated by symbolically declaring the islands the independent "Conch Republic" on 23 April 1982, surrendering after one minute and demanding one billion dollars in foreign aid (Wikipedia contributors, 2025a). The publicity stunt successfully forced the removal of the inspection station, but it also enshrined the Keys' identity as a quasi-autonomous smuggler's paradise in American popular memory. The same period saw the rise of the "Cocaine Cowboys" — the Medellín Cartel traffickers, Cuban-American gangs led by Sal Magluta and Willy Falcón, and operators such as Mickey Munday and Jon Roberts — whose go-fast boats routinely staged out of Keys marinas, while the Miami River Cops scandal (1985–1988) revealed how deeply police corruption had penetrated the supporting infrastructure (Hamacher, 2017; Lersch, 2001).
Rockstar Games has translated this history into Leonida Keys with characteristic density. The reveal trailers and promotional website depict the archipelago accessible exclusively via the Keys Causeway from Vice-Dale County — a deliberate echo of the chokepoint that produced the Conch Republic protest — and feature recurring imagery of go-fast boats, seaplanes, fishing trawlers with suspicious cargo holds, and isolated mangrove inlets ideal for unloading contraband (Rockstar Games, 2025; GTA Wiki, 2025). Protagonist Jason Duval, a Keys resident, is established in pre-release material as a low-level operator entangled with regional trafficking crews, with Lucia Caminos drawn into Keys-based smuggling jobs as the Bonnie-and-Clyde narrative escalates. Side content is expected to include boat-based delivery missions, airdrop interceptions over the shallow flats, marina-based money-laundering fronts, and confrontations with both Coast Guard analogues and rival cartels — gameplay loops that consciously mirror the Cocaine Cowboys-era smuggling economics described by Crandall (2020) and Farzad (2017). The Hurricane Roxy storyline, implied to have struck the Keys before the game's events, further evokes the post-disaster lawlessness that historically accompanied hurricane recovery in the real Keys, when damaged radar coverage and overstretched law enforcement created brief but exploitable smuggling windows.
By rendering the Keys not merely as a postcard destination but as a working drug-running corridor, Rockstar continues the franchise's tradition of using satire of real American criminal geography as core thematic material. The Leonida Keys are simultaneously the game's most idyllic tourist zone and one of its most dangerous criminal environments — a tension lifted directly from the documented historical record of the Florida Keys themselves.
Alvarado, F. (2011) '1981: Miami's deadliest summer', Miami New Times, 10 August. Available at: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/1981-miamis-deadliest-summer-6565290 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Cody, E. (1983) 'Cocaine flows to U.S. in record amounts', The Washington Post, 6 September, p. A2.
Crandall, R. (2020) Drugs and Thugs: The History and Future of America's War on Drugs. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Farzad, R. (2017) 'Coconut Grove's Mutiny Hotel was the cocaine kingpins' playground', Miami New Times, 17 October. Available at: https://www.miaminewtimes.com/news/roben-farzads-hotel-scarface-describes-miami-in-all-its-cocaine-glory-9753327 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
GTA Wiki (2025) Leonida Keys. Available at: https://gta.fandom.com/wiki/Leonida_Keys (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Hamacher, B. (2017) 'South Florida's most notorious "Cocaine Cowboys"', NBC Miami, 13 April. Available at: https://www.nbcmiami.com/news/local/south-floridas-most-notorious-cocaine-cowboys/11254/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Lersch, K. M. (2001) 'Drug related police corruption: the Miami experience', in Palmiotto, M. (ed.) Police Misconduct: A Reader for the 21st Century. London: Pearson, pp. 132–144.
Rockstar Games (2025) Grand Theft Auto VI – Leonida Keys. Promotional website. Available at: https://www.rockstargames.com/VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia contributors (2025a) Florida Keys. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_Keys (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia contributors (2025b) Miami drug war. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miami_drug_war (Accessed: 14 May 2026).