Book Boston attraction tickets

Few American cities carry their history as visibly as Boston. The Freedom Trail, a red-brick line threading through the city centre, connects sixteen sites that shaped the founding of the United States, from the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill to the Bunker Hill Monument across the river in Charlestown. Paul Revere's house still stands in the North End, the city's oldest surviving domestic structure, and the Old South Meeting House on Washington Street remains the room where colonists gathered before the events of December 1773 that would become the Boston Tea Party. That episode is now the subject of one of the city's most theatrical museum experiences, the Boston Tea Party Ships and Museum on Congress Street Bridge, where costumed actors and replica vessels reconstruct the night that tipped a continent toward revolution.

Boston's geography is compact and walkable in a way that surprises visitors expecting an American sprawl. The city sits on a peninsula shaped by the Charles River to the north and west and Boston Harbor to the east, and its neighbourhoods press close together: the brownstone streets of Back Bay, the cobbled lanes of Beacon Hill, the Italian bakeries and restaurants of the North End, the converted warehouses of the Seaport District. Cambridge, technically a separate city across the Charles, functions as an intellectual extension of Boston, home to Harvard and MIT and a cycling culture that makes a Cambridge bike tour a genuinely useful way to move between the university precincts and the riverbanks.