The blue and white look that makes Sidi Bou Said famous is not folk tradition left to chance; it was enforced by regulation introduced by a single wealthy foreigner.
The saint the village is named for
Local tradition identifies Sidi Bou Said, more fully Abu Said al-Baji, as a thirteenth century Sufi mystic who settled on the headland, with some accounts describing him also defending the coast against raids, a combination of spiritual and protective reputation that helped establish his tomb as a focus of local veneration and eventually gave the settlement his name.
A baron's colour scheme
In the early twentieth century, Baron Rodolphe d'Erlanger, a wealthy French-born musicologist and painter who settled in the village and built a grand residence there, championed and helped formalise the blue and white aesthetic that now defines the village, and building regulations subsequently made the colour scheme mandatory for property owners, converting what may have begun as local Andalusian-influenced custom into an enforced, protected visual identity.
A shrine inside a tourist village
The saint's tomb remains an active place of visitation within a village whose economy today runs substantially on tourism drawn by the very aesthetic built up around it, so the religious site and the postcard image of the village are now difficult to separate from each other in practice, even though they originated from different sources roughly seven centuries apart.