In the game
Trailer 2 has a couple of seconds of a different kind of swamp: not sawgrass prairie but flooded forest, pale grey trunks standing in dark water, Spanish moss, a vehicle pushing through the shade. The Extended Look comes back to the same forest. It’s Grassrivers with the lights turned down.
Fans have matched it to Big Cypress, the preserve north and west of the Everglades proper. The match rests on the trees: cypress domes (the rounded clumps of tall trees that mark deeper water), dwarf cypress standing bare in the prairie, and strands of forest with water running through them. Rockstar hasn’t named the place.
The real place
Big Cypress National Preserve covers about 730,000 acres and was created in 1974, partly to stop a jetport being built on top of it. It’s a preserve rather than a park, which means hunting, off-road vehicles and the traditional uses of the Miccosukee and Seminole people continue inside it, and it feels wilder and less managed than the Everglades next door.
The water here moves slowly south through the cypress toward the Ten Thousand Islands, and in the dry season the trees stand in a few inches of it, or in mud. Walk a boardwalk into a strand and the temperature drops, the light goes green and the sound turns to frogs. The detail a GTA fan will recognize is the dome: from the road, a low hump of trees rising out of the flat prairie, and inside it a cathedral of trunks with the sky closed out. That silhouette is all over the trailer.
Go there
Start at the Oasis Visitor Center on US-41, where the boardwalk over the roadside canal is guaranteed alligators, stacked along the bank a few feet from your shoes. Then choose. The quick version is the Kirby Storter Roadside Park boardwalk, a mile-long walk into a cypress strand a few minutes west, free and flat.
The full version is the Loop Road (County Road 94), a 24-mile road that leaves the Trail east of Oasis, runs south into the swamp, and rejoins it at Monroe Station. Most of it is gravel, potholed and slow, and that’s the point: dwarf cypress, gators in every culvert, and the Sweetwater Strand crossing where the forest closes in overhead. Allow two hours, go in daylight, and don’t take a low car after rain. There’s no signal and no services.
Clyde Butcher’s Big Cypress Gallery near Oasis shows the black-and-white photographs that made this swamp famous, and the Skunk Ape Research Headquarters at Ochopee is the roadside attraction the game would have invented if it didn’t exist. Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe at Ochopee is the lunch stop.
One honest warning: mosquitoes. From May to November they’re the worst in the state, and a still evening on the Loop Road is something you’ll remember for the wrong reasons. Long sleeves, repellent, windows up at dusk.
Nearby
- The Ochopee post office: at the preserve’s western edge, 15 minutes from Oasis.
- Everglades City and Chokoloskee: where the cypress water ends up, 25 minutes southwest.
- Shark Valley and the gators: 30 minutes east on the Trail, the sawgrass half of Grassrivers.
- The airboat ride on the Tamiami Trail: on the way back to Miami.
Updated September 12, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.