

Its rich history attracts many tourists, with Faneuil Hall alone drawing more than 20 million visitors per year. The city has expanded beyond the original peninsula through land reclamation and municipal annexation. Upon American independence from Great Britain, the city continued to be an important port and manufacturing hub as well as a center for education and culture. It was the scene of several key events of the American Revolution and the nation's founding, such as the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, the Battle of Bunker Hill, and the siege of Boston. īoston is one of the oldest municipalities in America, founded on the Shawmut Peninsula in 1630 by Puritan settlers from the English town of the same name. A broader combined statistical area (CSA), generally corresponding to the commuting area and including Worcester, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island, is home to approximately 8.2 million people, making it the sixth most populous in the United States. The city is the economic and cultural anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area known as Greater Boston, a metropolitan statistical area (MSA) home to 4,941,632 million people as of 2020, ranking as the tenth-largest MSA in the country.


The city boundaries encompass an area of about 48.4 sq mi (125 km 2) and a population of 675,647 as of 2020.
