To celebrate the centenary of one of the first documents to protect historic buildings, the theme of this year’s Journées du Patrimoine (Open House weekend) this year is “1913-2013: 100 years of protection”. As usual, you have two days to explore places that are otherwise closed to the public, and as usual there’s some amazing stuff on offer.

Click through for some of our suggestions…Even by whittling down the list of places to visit to just Paris, and not the nearby suburbs (there are 48 places to visit simply in the two arrondissements near our hotels), the choice is bewildering, but perhaps you’d like to see the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur, whose salons and façades have just been restored, or the Théâtre de la Comédie-Française which has special guided visits organised to show how their recent renovation (that closed the place for a year) is looking.

In the past few years, we’ve been able to use the Open House weekend to see some amazing places – the head offices of a bank, the Sorbonne, the ‘Caisse de Dépôts‘, the Bank of France and Hôtel de Ville. The Senate will also be open, and after our article about the building’s façade, we’ll definitely be lining up to see the Sainte-Geneviève library… five times (for the general visit, the backstage visit, the unguided visit, the visit of the reserves and the visit of the ‘cabinet de curiosités’). Wow!

Check out the official site for more ideas (there’s a button at the bottom of the page to translate the site into English).

Open House weekend is in Paris (and all around Europe) on 14th & 15th September 2013

Official site: www.journeesdupatrimoine.culture.fr (lots of great things to explore)

Facebook: facebook.com/journeeseuropeennesdupatrimoine

Twitter: twitter.com/jepofficiel, hashtag #JEP2013