Breaking Bad: Albuquerque on Screen

In the first episode, Walt is so short of money that he works a second job after school, wiping down cars at a car wash; the next day he collapses there and learns he has cancer. The same business returns at the end of the story: Walt and Skyler buy the car wash as a front to launder his drug money. The real one, formerly the Octopus Car Wash on Menaul Boulevard, appears in 16 episodes. It has since been renamed and remodelled but is still washing cars.

Visitor guidance: It's a working car wash at 9516 Snow Heights Circle NE; the simplest way to visit is to buy a wash.

A low-rise motel with a big roadside sign at Central Avenue and Interstate 25, the Crossroads stood in for the kind of cheap, anonymous place the show's characters go when they need to disappear for a night. It appears in three episodes, from "…And the Bag's in the River" in season one to "Half Measures" in season three. Central Avenue is the old Route 66 through Albuquerque, and its surviving motels and neon signs show up again and again in the series.

Visitor guidance: The Crossroads is a working motel; photograph the sign from the street and respect its guests.

In "Crazy Handful of Nothin'", the sixth episode, Walt, losing his hair to chemotherapy, shaves his head, calls himself Heisenberg and walks into the headquarters of the volatile drug boss Tuco Salamanca to demand $50,000. When Tuco laughs, Walt throws a piece of fulminated mercury on the floor and blows out the windows — the moment the mild chemistry teacher turns into someone else. The building is Java Joe's, a café on Park Avenue SW in the Barelas neighbourhood near downtown — in real life a far calmer place to sit.

With its glowing neon sign, the Dog House Drive In is one of the best-known landmarks on old Route 66, and on the show it is a place for shady deals in the parking lot: it appears in three episodes, from "Crazy Handful of Nothin'" in the first season to "Blood Money" in the last. It is a real hot-dog drive-in at 1216 Central Avenue NW, near Old Town, a short drive from the Crossroads Motel.

Visitor guidance: The Dog House is still open as a drive-in; order at the counter or from your car.

Saul Goodman, the strip-mall criminal lawyer whose slogan is "Better Call Saul!", is introduced in season two, and his office exterior first appears in "4 Days Out". The building, at Montgomery and Eubank in north-east Albuquerque, is home to a country-and-western bar, the Dirty Bourbon Dance Hall & Saloon. Saul went on to get his own prequel series, Better Call Saul, also filmed in Albuquerque, which ran from 2015 to 2022.

Gus Fring runs a cheerful fried-chicken chain, Los Pollos Hermanos, as the front for the biggest meth operation in the Southwest — and is polite, patient and terrifying. The restaurant where Walt waits to meet him, in the episode "Mandala", is a branch of Twisters, a local burrito chain, on Isleta Boulevard in the South Valley; it appears in nine episodes. It is still an ordinary fast-food restaurant, and the Los Pollos Hermanos logo remains painted on a wall inside for fans' photos.

Visitor guidance: Twisters is at 4257 Isleta Boulevard SW; it is a busy local restaurant, so buy something if you stop for photos.

Breaking Bad ended in 2013, but Jesse's story continued in the 2019 Netflix film El Camino, which follows him on the run in the hours after the finale. Near the end, a flashback returns to the old days: Walt and Jesse share breakfast in a diner after a cook that has lasted several days, one of the last times we see them together. The scene was shot at the Owl Cafe on Eubank Boulevard, a retro diner in the north-east of the city.