Numbers this year are forecast to reach just under 9 million. In the years since, a rising tide of visitors has flooded in, up from 2.62 million in the year 2000, to just under 8 million last year, drawn by Prague’s reputation as home to stunning baroque and gothic architectural gems – and cheap beer. The spectacle was graphic evidence that “ over-tourism”, a phenomenon more commonly associated with destinations such as Barcelona, Amsterdam, Venice and Edinburgh, has arrived in Prague – a city that was all but sealed off to western visitors until 1989 when the velvet revolution swept the former communist regime from power. On a night when thousands of Czechs marched through the city marking the anniversary of the Soviet-led invasion on 21 August 1968 that crushed the liberal Prague Spring in communist Czechoslovakia, tourists from locations as varied as Australia, New Zealand, Germany, France, Brazil, Belgium and Armenia roamed the streets on a different mission – to have fun and get drunk. ‘The pub crawls have been going on for 15 years, but it’s got worse’.
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