In the game
One of Trailer 2’s most talked-about shots is a field on fire: a wall of orange flame and black smoke rolling across flat farmland while a vehicle tears along a dirt road beside it. Anyone from south-central Florida recognized it instantly. That is not a wildfire. That is the cane harvest.
The match is about as clear as it gets. Florida grows roughly half of America’s cane sugar, almost all of it in the Everglades Agricultural Area south of Lake Okeechobee, and growers burn each field before cutting it to strip the leaves. Rockstar has described Ambrosia as a town built around sugar, the trailer shows the fields burning, and the Extended Look gives you more of the same flat, open country from behind the wheel. No town or road is named, so this is a match of landscape rather than landmark, but a very confident one.
The real place
The land here is muck, black peat soil drained from the Everglades a century ago, and it is some of the richest farmland in the country. Belle Glade’s city sign reads “Her Soil Is Her Fortune.” Around it and Pahokee, cane runs to the horizon in every direction, cut by dead-straight canals and haul roads, with the green wall of the Herbert Hoover Dike closing off the lake to the north.
From October to April the harvest runs. Fields go up in burns that last minutes and send smoke columns visible from thirty miles, then the harvesters move in and the cane trucks and trains roll toward the mills. Ash drifts over the towns, the black snow that locals have complained about for decades. The detail a GTA fan will recognize is the sheer flatness, and a fire on the horizon that nobody is running toward.
Go there
Take SR 80 west from West Palm Beach for about an hour to Belle Glade. From there, loop: SR 715 north toward Pahokee, the Conners Highway (US 441) along the lake, and US 27 back south past South Bay. Any paved county road between them puts you in the middle of the cane. Late afternoon in December or January, with the sun low and a burn going somewhere, is the trailer.
Both towns are small and poor and have been for a long time; be a decent visitor. Pahokee’s marina and campground on the lake is a good place to stop, with the dike walk right there. Lunch is a diner or a taqueria in Belle Glade; there are several, pick a busy one.
The honest warning: do not drive onto haul roads or stop beside an active burn. The fields are private, the smoke can close a road in seconds, and the cane trucks are enormous and do not slow down. Watch from public roads with the windows up. In summer there is no harvest, no burning and no shade.
Nearby
- Clewiston and the U.S. Sugar mill: where the cane from these fields ends up, thirty minutes west on US 27.
- Lake Okeechobee: the big inland lake: the dike at Pahokee is the easiest place to see it.
- Cattle country around Okeechobee: north around the lake, the fields turn to pasture.
Updated September 12, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.