Discover Massachusetts

Massachusetts is small, dense and disproportionately consequential. The country's founding arguments were had here, its oldest university sits across the river from Boston, and a state the size of an average English county holds a world-class city, a National Seashore and a mountain region within two hours of each other.

Boston is the centre of gravity and where most visits begin — walkable, historic, and the only major American city where the colonial street plan survived. West of it, Cambridge holds Harvard and MIT.

Cape Cod curls into the Atlantic to the southeast, with the islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket beyond it — summer places, largely shut in winter. In the far west the Berkshires are hill country with an unusually concentrated arts scene for a rural region.

In between are the towns where the Revolution started, the ports that ran the whaling fleets, and the mill cities that industrialised America.