Prague: Growing pains for Czech tourism |
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Prague: Growing pains for Czech tourism |
2006-06-21 11:22:54 |
| autor: Graham Bowley |
PRAGUE One recent summer evening, thousands of tourists coursed, guidebooks in hand, on a route here from the churches of Old Town Square, over the Charles Bridge and up the steep lanes to Prague Castle.
"We are enjoying the architecture as well as the countryside outside, where there are Neolithic stones," said Eloise Twining of San Francisco, as she admired the spires of the Church of Our Lady Before Tyn.
The crowd's route has become well-worn by tourists since this young, small country emerged from Communism into a new era 16 years ago.
Drawn by the city's fairy-tale mystique but also increasingly by its cheap beer, 7.4 million visitors poured into the Czech Republic last year.
Now, despite new competition from the beaches of Bulgaria and Croatia and the cobbled squares of pretty Polish cities like Krakow, the annual number of tourists in the Czech Republic is expected to almost double within the next five years, according to the business research organization Eurobarometer. Tourists will soon outnumber the Czech population of 10 million. It is a trend that is transforming the Czech economy.
Of the countries that joined the European Union in 2004, the Czech Republic, along with Slovenia, will soon generate the most, proportionately, from tourism, according to Caroline Bremner, head of global research at Eurobarometer.
Many tourists come for Prague's architecture, its associations with Franz Kafka, its Communist past and its Jewish heritage. About 600,000 tourists visit the Jewish Museum in Prague each year, according to Helena Pojarova, its deputy director, making it among the city's most popular attractions.
But the roads out of Prague are also busy these days, lined with tour buses making trips to towns such as Plzen, famous for its brewery, and Karlovy Vary, a spa town close to the German border. At Plzen, the parking lot is filled with cars with German license plates that have made the short trip from the country's large neighbor. The Czech government is seeking millions of euros in extra development funds from the European Union to help boost its tourist industry and improve roads and more of its infrastructure, and it wants a new focus on provincial attractions like the spa towns.
In Karlovy Vary one recent afternoon, tourists strolled in front of the pink and blue hotels that, in an earlier century, were popular with Russian royalty and visitors like Goethe. A group of Russians, some from Novosibirsk, gathered near the visitor center.
Some 28,000 Russians visited Karlovy Vary in 2004, according to the local tourist office, making Russians the town's biggest national grouping of tourists. But other foreigners are visiting the town in increasing numbers. Near the elegant colonnade, where a band was playing, Chen Tsui Hua was filling her porcelain cup with warm spring water from a pipe, one of a party of 22 from Taiwan who were on a 10-day tour of the Czech Republic.
Tourism first boomed in the country in the early years after the Velvet Revolution. Visitor numbers declined after the 9/11 attacks, a downturn in global tourism and devastating floods that hit the Czech Republic as well as other regions of central Europe in 2002.
But tourism rebounded 18 percent last year, to pre-flood levels. Along with Bulgaria, the Czech Republic had the strongest tourism growth in any Central and East European country, according to the World Tourism Organization. The region is registering the fastest expansion in tourism on the Continent.
While tourist numbers are increasing, however, tourist receipts are expected to grow only a fraction as fast, reflecting a phenomenon that has taken place amid the rebound of the last couple of years and specifically since 2003, when low-cost airlines first started to fly to the Czech Republic.
About a dozen low-cost carriers now fly into the Czech Republic, including EasyJet, Ryanair, Germanwings and Smart Wings, the Czech Republic's own lost-cost carrier.
Last year alone, about 650,000 tourists visited the Czech Republic from Britain, according to CzechTourism. Britain was second only to Germany, which supplied 1.5 million visitors.
The budget-minded visitors the airlines bring are not necessarily attracted by Prague's history; many come for the capital's cheap beer. On many evenings, they transform Prague into a raucous party town, providing another side of the tourism on which the country has come to depend.
"The working class is coming," said Petr Dodel, a prominent local businessman who runs a music theater in the city. "The Czech Republic has become a cultural meeting point for tourists from Germany and Britain with Ukrainian women," he said, referring to the young Ukrainian women who go to Prague's dance clubs. British pubs, like the George & Dragon, line the squares, adorned with Union Jacks and the cross of St. George.
The Vaclavska Pekarna bakery on Wenceslas Square, a favorite of the Velvet Revolution generation, is now the Casino Happy Day, one of the many "ruleta" bars on the streets beside the ubiquitous dance clubs. Some local Czechs say they just don't go to Wenceslas Square at night any more.
The new tourists' sometimes aggressive behavior has started a debate about whether the government should act to discourage the short-stay party trippers. But it is wary of denting a tourism industry on which it has come to depend and which, according to Barbora Belikova of CzechTourism in Brussels, is now the country's second-largest sector after the car industry.
"They are tourists as well," she says. "We hope they will fall in love with the Czech Republic and will come back one day with their family and children to enjoy a completely different kind of holiday."
Oldrich Tuma, director of the Institute of Contemporary History at the Czech Academy of Sciences, also takes a positive view of the new visitors. He points out that tourism is hardly a new phenomenon for the Czech Republic. When it was Communist, Prague was an important destination for Soviet-world visitors from Russia, Poland and East Germany, but it also received visitors from Western states like Italy.
"We now have five times more people than we did 20 years ago and 10 times more hotels and pensions," Tuma said. "I travel. I am a tourist, and it is good to see that Prague has also now become one of the major European tourist cities." |
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