GTA 5 Map Guide: Los Santos, Blaine County and Key Locations

Los Santos feels smaller once you have flown across it a hundred times, but GTA 5's map was one of the biggest ever made when the game launched, and it still packs an unusual amount of variety into one island: downtown towers, gang territory, beaches, farmland, desert, wetlands and a full mountain range. Here is how it all fits together.

How Big Is the GTA 5 Map?

The full map measures approximately 49 square miles (127 km²), counting both land and the surrounding ocean. Los Santos is modelled on Los Angeles, and Rockstar compressed roughly a tenth of the real city's footprint into the game — yet the map is still larger than the real San Francisco or Paris. That compression is the trick: nearly every street is a reference, a parody or a landmark, with more than 60 named locations spread across it.

The Main Regions

• Los Santos — the city in the south: Downtown's towers, the Vinewood Hills mansions, the studios and the Vinewood sign, Vespucci Beach, the airport and the working-class neighbourhoods of Strawberry and Davis.
• Blaine County — the rural north: Sandy Shores on the Alamo Sea, the town of Paleto Bay, farmland, trailer parks and meth country. Trevor's home turf.
• Mount Chiliad and the wilderness — the state's highest peak, ringed by the Chiliad Mountain State Wilderness, Raton Canyon and Mount Gordo.
• The coast and ocean — fully explorable underwater, with wrecks, a submerged UFO and hidden packages on the seabed.

Locations Worth Knowing

Safehouses anchor each protagonist: Franklin starts at his aunt's house in Strawberry before moving to a Vinewood Hills mansion, Michael lives in Rockford Hills, and Trevor starts in a Sandy Shores trailer before taking over other properties as the story unfolds. Story-mode safehouses and garages cannot be customised — what you see is what the story gives you.

Hot zones are where the good hardware lives. Fort Zancudo, the military base on the west coast, holds fighter jets and tanks for anyone bold enough to steal them, and Bolingbroke Penitentiary and the LSPD headquarters are similarly guarded. Expect an instant, heavy wanted response.

Secrets reward explorers: a UFO that appears over Mount Chiliad once you reach 100% completion, a ghost on Mount Gordo late at night, the Epsilon Program's desert compound, and caches around the Alamo Sea. Between missions there is also a full leisure circuit — golf at Richman, tennis, darts in Sandy Shores, triathlons, parachuting and the flight school at the airport.

Getting Around Quickly

Taxis can be called from your phone and will skip the drive for a fee. A fast car or bike makes the highway run between the city and Paleto Bay manageable, aircraft make it trivial, and the sneakiest trick of all is character switching: swapping protagonists instantly relocates you to wherever that character currently is on the map.

How GTA Online's Map Differs

The geography is identical, but Online layers far more on top of it: enterable businesses and properties including the Diamond Casino & Resort, the Agency, bunkers, nightclubs, auto shops, high-end apartments and the Doomsday facilities, plus the Kosatka submarine. Most significantly, the island of Cayo Perico sits far off the coast and is exclusive to GTA Online, reachable for its heist and related content.