

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 a census-estimated 4.8 million people in 2016 and 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.
