Port Gellhorn

Port Gellhorn is described as Leonida's forgotten coast: it used to be a holiday spot, and now it's living with what came after. Cheap motels, shut-down attractions, empty strip malls.

The marketing for this game leans hard on neon and money, and this is the other side of it. Historically it's also the sort of place Rockstar puts its most interesting side content.

Old roadside Florida

Florida's full of places like this. In the middle of the twentieth century the state built a huge amount of roadside tourism, back when the way you saw Florida was to drive down it and stop at things: motor courts, gator farms, mermaid shows, shell shops, and small independent attractions along a two-lane highway. Then the interstates got built and the big Orlando parks arrived in the seventies, the traffic went elsewhere, and a lot of what had been built was left standing where it was.

What's left is a particular kind of American ruin: still open, and visibly serving a fraction of the people it was built for.

The Starlet, Delight's and a gun shop

Rockstar's material does put a few names on the town. There's the Starlet Motel, whose sign is the picture at the top of this page. There's Delight's Cabaret, which is about as much nightlife as the town runs to. And there's a pawn and gun shop, which turns up behind a car further down this page (our regions guide has all three).

That's a motel, a cabaret and somewhere to sell what you stole and buy something to steal more with. It's a very short list, and it already sounds like the town.

Rockstar's best places have no money

This studio's always done its best world-building in the places with no money in them. Sandy Shores and Grapeseed had more character per square mile than most of Los Santos. Red Dead Redemption 2 put its strongest material in the towns that were getting left behind, and the boom towns got less of it.

Port Gellhorn fills that slot on this map. It's the region least likely to turn up in a trailer and the one where players are most likely to lose an hour they didn't plan to.

Probably named for Martha Gellhorn

Gellhorn is very probably a nod to Martha Gellhorn, one of the best-known American war correspondents of the twentieth century, who had a real Florida link through Key West. Rockstar hasn't confirmed it. Given the studio's habit of naming places after people who'd have had something withering to say about them, it fits.

The town even made it into Rockstar's reported pitch to Miami-Dade in September. WLRN reported the plans included installations at PortMiami themed on Port Gellhorn, as part of a bigger Vice City takeover the county was asked about and didn't approve (the pitch and the pushback). It's a funny choice for a real port, given what the place is in the game.

What isn't known

We haven't been shown how big it is, exactly where it sits on the coast or how far it is from Vice City, or what you can actually do there beyond the motel and the cabaret. So far it's turned up in Rockstar's region descriptions and screenshots, and there's been no extended footage of it.