It was created on 4 October 1999, having previously been the eastern half of a larger Buol Tolitoli Regency.

[1] The table includes the locations of the district administrative centres, the number of administrative villages in each district (108 rural desa and 7 urban kelurahan in total), and its postal code.

Formerly mountain dwellers, the Buol now live in scattered villages on the central part of the northern peninsula, to the north-west of the Gorontalo province.

The history of the Buol region is one of the rise and fall of small kingdoms and their occasional confederation into larger entities for defense and conquest.

The Buol language is part of a larger linguistic grouping called the Gorontalic family which also includes the Bintauna, Kaidipang, Bolango, Gorontalo, Lolak and Suwawa languages.