Sidi Bou Said

The town occupies a low promontory on the Gulf of Tunis, a twenty-minute drive or a pleasant walk north from the Carthage archaeological park, and the first thing that registers is the deliberate visual discipline: every building is whitewashed, every door and window shutter painted the same deep cobalt blue, every ironwork balcony in matching geometric tracery.

This colour code is not ancient tradition but a mid-twentieth-century aesthetic movement led by the artist Maurice Boccaccio, who returning from Greece in the 1950s convinced the municipality to adopt the blue-and-white scheme; the effect has since become so identified with the town that most visitors do not realise it is a relatively recent invention.

The narrow streets cascade down the cliff toward a small harbour where the white and blue continues on the fishing boats, and at the summit the Ottoman-era Sidi Bou Said shrine, after which the town is named, draws local pilgrims alongside tourists photographing the view across the gulf.

The famous café Sidi Bou Said, perched at the cliff edge, is the established stopping point: the view from its terrace takes in the entire gulf, the fishing boats below and the white dome of a mausoleum, and it has served generations of writers and painters including Paul Klee, who spent time here in the 1920s.

Artists have been drawn to the quality of the Mediterranean light here since the early twentieth century: the intense white of the walls bounces afternoon light into the streets while the blue shadows are unusually deep, a chromatic effect that appealed to painters of the French Orientalist tradition and later to the surrealists.

The town is small enough to walk end to end in thirty minutes but the experience is in the details — a painted door matching the sky, a lantern bracket in twisted iron, the way the whitewashed walls glow pink in the last hour of daylight — and the souvenir shops along the main approach sell the same blue-and-white ceramics that tourists photograph on the doorways.

Beneath the town, reached by the road that winds down to the harbour, a small beach and fishing harbour offer the most authentic glimpse of local life: fishing boats painted blue, nets spread to dry, and men playing cards in the shade of a low wall, largely indifferent to the tourist crowds at the summit.

The town is also known for its distinctive pottery and ceramics, painted in the same cobalt blue and white that characterises the architecture, and these are sold throughout the medina as both souvenirs and functional kitchenware.

The uniform blue-and-white aesthetic is one of the most distinctive townscapes in the Mediterranean, immediately recognisable in photographs and genuinely different to experience in person.

The artistic heritage is substantial: Paul Klee, André Gide, Simone de Beauvoir and many others have written or painted here, and the house of the French painter and tastemaker Maurice Boccaccio is open to visitors as a small gallery.

The town is compact and easily combined with the nearby Carthage ruins on the same day trip from Tunis.