Buc is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France region.
Its inhabitants are called Bucois (masculine) and Bucoises (feminine).
Buc is located 21 km south west of Paris, France.
The old town and a part of the city is located inside the vallée de la Bièvre (Bièvre valley) at an altitude of approximately 100 meters. Most of its residential neighborhood are implanted on the plateau de Saclay (Saclay's plateau) at around 50 meters higher.
Buc's surrounding communes are: Versailles at its north, Jouy-en-Josas at its north east, Les Loges-en-Josas at its South east, Toussus-le-Noble at its south, Châteaufort at its extreme south west and Guyancourt at its west.
The name « Buc » derives from the latin buscum which means boxwood.
Yvelines (French pronunciation: [ivlin]) is a French department in the region of Île-de-France.
Yvelines was created from the western part of the former department of Seine-et-Oise on 1 January 1968 in accordance with a law passed on 10 January 1964 and a décret d'application (a decree specifying how a law should be enforced) from 26 February 1965. It inherited Seine-et-Oise's official number of 78.
It gained the communes of Châteaufort and Toussus-le-Noble from the adjacent department of Essonne in 1969.
The departmental capital, Versailles, which grew up around Louis XIV's château, was also the French capital for more than a century under the Ancien Régime and again between 1871 and 1879 during the early years of the Third Republic. Since then the château has continued to welcome the parlement when called upon to sit in a congressional sitting, jointly with the upper house in order to enact constitutional changes or, as happened most recently in June 2009, to listen to a formal declaration by the president.