Wenceslas Square really comes alive after dark, when its restaurants, cinemas and nightclubs attract a boisterous crowd.

Prague's most famous thoroughfare is actually an impressive 750m-long boulevard, dominated at the northern end by Josef Schulz's neo-Renaissance National Museum. Once staging a horse market, Wenceslas Square was later a focus for political demonstration. When the Soviet army occupied Prague in August 1968 it was here that the distraught population gathered to protest. Several months later a student, Jan Palach, burned himself to death on the steps of the National Museum. Following the collapse of the Communist regime in December 1989, Václav Havel and Alexander Dubček appeared on the balcony of No 36 to greet their ecstatic supporters. Palach and other victims of the regime are commemorated in a small shrine in front of Josef Myslbek's equestrian statue of St Wenceslas, which was unveiled in 1912.