The Observer - 25.08.2019

The Observer

25.08.

‘ Drunk tourists are acting like

they’ve conquered our city’

The fall

of Prague

As visitor numbers soar to 9 million

a year, the Czech capital is launching

a crackdown to stop noise, nuisance

and the defacing of landmarks.

Robert Tait joins one of the

organised tourist pub crawls that

are blighting the lives of locals

E

ugen Kukla could not

have made his feelings

clearer as 120 drunken

tourists thronged nois-

ily past his home around

midnight, rudely break-

ing the silence of a normally sedate

city-centre residential street.

“Fuck pub crawls, fuck pub crawls,”

he repeated over and over again,

while fi lming the scene on his smart

phone. Some of the crowd reacted in

amusement, smiling and waving into

the camera.

But Kukla, 55, a photojournalist, did

not see the joke. “It’s an expression

of my personal feelings, a buildup of

frustration over a long period of time,

years and years and years,” he said.

Kukla says his and his family’s lives

have been disrupted by the snow-

balling trade in pub crawls through

the centre of Prague and past their

fourth-storey fl at. “It’s been going on

for 10 or 15 years – but it’s got worse.”

Kukla’s act of resistance was wit-

nessed by the Observer, which joined

one of the organised crawls along

with a senior councillor from Prague

1 municipality , the local authority

Special

Report

Continued overleaf

Tourists at the Charles Bridge this summer: Prague has become the fi fth most-visited destination in Europe. Photograph by Bartek Sadowski/Bloomberg

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