The Swiss waterfalls that turned Sherlock Holmes’s death into a tourist attraction

The Reichenbach Falls near Meiringen are among the highest in the Alps. Their most dramatic cascade drops 250 metres, creating a striking natural landmark on the River Aar.

But the falls might have remained just another Swiss attraction if Arthur Conan Doyle had not marked their name on a map. In “The Final Problem,” the British writer imagined a brutal confrontation there between Sherlock Holmes and his nemesis, Professor James Moriarty. The story ended with both men plunging to their deaths.

Doyle intended the scene to end the adventures of characters he had grown tired of. His readers, however, reacted with such fury that he reversed course. In “The Empty House,” Holmes reappeared and explained that he had not died after all. He had simply taken several years off and travelled around Tibet.

The fictional death turned Reichenbach into a place of pilgrimage. Thousands of visitors come each year to see where Holmes supposedly died, and few leave without taking a selfie beside the statue of the detective. Wearing his distinctive deerstalker hat, smoking a pipe and sitting with his legs crossed, the statue stands opposite the Sherlock Holmes Museum in Meiringen.

The museum places the character in the historical setting of crime in London during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It also notes that Scotland Yard still uses some of the deductive methods associated with Holmes. Visitors can climb toward the falls, try to work out where Holmes and Moriarty supposedly went over the edge, and browse shops filled with souvenirs whose subject is hardly a mystery. Meiringen lies near Lake Brienz, about 50 kilometres from Lucerne and 100 kilometres from Zurich.