Sidi Bou Said Marina

Rows of yachts occupy the site where houses on stilts stood until the beginning of the nineteen sixties. Families from Sidi Bou Said owned these coastal structures, which were called baraka. When some of the houses became vacant, the owners of some of them began renting out the premises to groups for parties. People then gathered inside wooden houses above the water where the present-day pontoons stand.

In the early nineteen sixties, city officials responsible for improvements decided to clear the shore and create an equipped harbor. The stilt houses were demolished. For their owners, the outcome was literal: not a single former structure remained here. The premises where groups gathered disappeared as well.

Builders completed the main breakwater in nineteen sixty-five and the second one in nineteen seventy. The site was chosen because of the hill: it shelters the marina from the prevailing northwesterly wind. The breakwaters enclosed a protected basin where yachts could be kept, hulls repaired, fuel taken on, and sailing learned.

The engineers solved one problem and left another to the people who service the port. Since construction, about five thousand cubic meters of sand and silt have settled at the entrance every year. Without periodically deepening the fairway, yachts would gradually lose their passage. By the second breakwater, the same movement of sand created a beach.

Of the four hundred twenty berths, three hundred eighty were allocated to pleasure craft and yachts, with several dozen more for fishermen. Nothing remains of the stilt houses: berths now run above their former site, while places for fishing boats remain at the edge of the yacht marina.