Museum of Fine Arts
Just seven miles (11.3 kilometers) from Logan Airport in the center of town is the fourth-largest museum in the USA, holding almost half a million works of art.
Boston's Museum of Fine Arts offers a comprehensive range of work from different time periods all around the world. Egyptian sculptures, American art, Chinese calligraphy, Japanese pottery and paintings by European masters including Gaugin, Renoir, Monet, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Manet and Degas are just a few of the highlights.
Held in a beautiful building with a café and restaurant on-site, there are also regular special exhibitions of artistic movements or specific artists.
Fenway Park
Boston's Major League Baseball (MLB) team, the Boston Red Sox, calls Fenway Park home just six miles (9.6 kilometers) from Logan International Airport.
Steeped in history, Fenway Park is the oldest stadium in MLB, having hosted Red Sox games since 1912 alongside many other events, including football matches, soccer, hockey and music concerts.
The park is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and offers a great chance to learn about the history of baseball and the Red Sox, thanks to its in-depth guided tours.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum
Close to the Museum of Fine Arts in the Longwood area of the city, about seven miles (11.3 kilometers) from Boston Logan Airport, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is packed with an internationally renowned collection of historic and contemporary art from Europe, Asia and America.
Atmospheric architecture and design combine to echo a Venetian palace-style building, arranged around a central courtyard that’s full of plantings. This intimate setting beautifully frames the art, which includes paintings, sculptures, drawings and writings by artists like Titian, Rembrandt, Michelangelo and Botticelli. A truly breathtaking and unique museum and experience; it’s one of the lesser-known gems of cultural America.
Freedom Trail
Boston is full of buildings and places with important links to American history; the Freedom Trail, which is a 2.5-mile (four-kilometer) Downtown walk, takes you around 16 of those historic locations.
Starting at Boston Common just four miles (6.4 kilometers) from Logan Airport, the route winds to the Bunker Hill Monument in Charlestown and can be walked with or without a tour guide.
It’s a rich experience for anyone interested in American history - it features, amongst other sites, the USS Constitution, the graves of the signers of independence, the meeting house where the Boston Tea Party was organized and the site of the Boston Massacre.
Even if history isn't your biggest interest, it's a great way to see some of the city, its green spaces and its stunning architecture.
North End
A vibrant and historic neighborhood just 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) from Logan International, North End has been settled since the 1630s and has a strong Italian American presence.
There are endless Italian restaurants, historic buildings, bakeries, gelato and coffee shops to explore, as well as plenty of public and performing arts and summer festival feasts in which to partake.
North End is a wonderful people-watching district where you can take 30 minutes to enjoy a coffee or spend an entire day sampling the varied cuisine and culture.
Boston Public Library
About six miles (9.6 kilometers) from Logan Airport, you can find the Boston Public Library, which is the third-largest library in the USA with its 23 million items ranging from books and films to maps and manuscripts.
Set primarily in the grand architecture of the McKim Building, which is laid out like a Renaissance cloister around a central courtyard, it was designed as a “palace for the people” and is lavishly constructed and decorated.
Featuring regular exhibitions of rare books and works of art, it's a dream visit for bookworms, but also a quiet, almost cathedral-like space in which to unwind and pass some time. It’s also the spot outside which the Boston Marathon finishes every year.
Boston Public Garden
A beautiful park just five miles (eight kilometers) from Logan International Airport, Boston Public Garden is an idyllic landscape full of diverse plants and a large pond.
Swan boats on the pond have become a popular tourist attraction, vying for space with bustling populations of real swans and ducks throughout the warm months of the year. The plantings and flower beds are often replanted to a rotating schedule to ensure flowers are blooming in both spring and fall and there are many statues to be found along the various pathways.
The park has been famous since the book Make Way for Ducklings was published; a statue of the ducks in the book has become a popular place for children and adults to get a photo.
Samuel Adams Brewery
The Boston Beer Company's flagship brand, named after the founding father, Samuel Adams Brewery produces Samuel Adams Boston Lager with a traditional brewing process and dabbles with many variants of beer.
With an IPA, a light beer, aged Belgian-style beers, seasonal variants and experiments including nitrogen gas carbonation and one of the strongest commercial beers in the world (at 24 per cent abv), there's a lot of choice at Sam Adams’.
At only eight miles (12.9 kilometers) from Logan Airport, the brewery provides an engaging and entertaining tour that takes you through the brewing process and the history of the building, before ending in a beer-tasting session with tuition on how to taste and judge the quality of the samples.