In the game
Rockstar has not shown a town in Grassrivers. What we’ve seen is swamp, airboats, gators and cypress forest; a region that size will have somewhere to buy gas and beer, but nobody outside the studio knows what it looks like. So this is a travel idea. A swamp town in a game about people on the wrong side of the law looks like it draws on somewhere like this, because there is only one real town at the end of the Everglades and it has a story the writers would have found hard to resist.
That story, in a sentence: in 1983 federal agents raided Everglades City and arrested a large share of the town’s men for running marijuana through the islands on their crab boats. Rockstar has never mentioned it. We mention it because it’s true and public record, and the town is worth a visit regardless.
The real place
Everglades City was built in the 1920s as the base for Barron Collier’s road-building operation, when the Tamiami Trail was being cut through the swamp, and it was the Collier County seat until Hurricane Donna wrecked it in 1960. Chokoloskee, on a shell mound island three miles south across a causeway, is older and stranger: a Calusa site, then a frontier trading post, and the setting for the killing of Edgar Watson in 1910 that Peter Matthiessen turned into a novel.
Today it’s a stone-crab port of a few hundred people, with crab traps stacked in every yard, a grid of wide, empty streets, a 1920s bank building, a 1920s laundry that’s now the Museum of the Everglades, and the Rod and Gun Club, a white clapboard lodge on the river that has hosted presidents and has barely changed since. The detail a GTA fan will recognize is the traps and the boats: a working fleet in a town with one road in, backed by ten thousand islands nobody can police.
Go there
Drive in on SR 29, worth it in itself. The Gulf Coast Visitor Center of Everglades National Park runs boat tours into the Ten Thousand Islands, 90 minutes among mangrove islands with dolphins and manatees, and rents kayaks; the park’s concession changes hands occasionally, so check what’s running.
Cross to Chokoloskee for the Smallwood Store, the 1906 trading post on stilts that’s now a museum, and stand on the shore where the Watson shooting happened. Then eat stone crab in season; several places in town serve their own catch, and the Rod and Gun Club’s porch is the atmospheric option. Some places are still cash only; check before you sit down.
One honest warning: this town floods. Irma in 2017 and Ian in 2022 both put the Gulf through people’s living rooms, and some businesses are still rebuilding or gone. Hours and openings change, summer is dead quiet, and the mosquitoes from May to October are the stuff of legend. Winter is the season, and February’s Seafood Festival is the weekend.
Nearby
- Big Cypress: the swamp that drains into these islands, 25 minutes back up the road.
- The Ochopee post office: 15 minutes east on the Trail, for the postcard.
- Alligator Alley: exit 80 is 30 minutes north, the fast way back to either coast.
Updated September 12, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.