In the province of Oyon, department of Lima between 2500 and 4100 meters above sea level, exist around 40 Doctrinal Chapels built in the 17th century. The Catholic Church built the chapels in order to eliminate persistent pagan idolatries throughout 100 years of Spanish presence in Peru. The architectural expression of these Chapels corresponds to a mestizo-vernacular version of the late Renaissance of the 16th century in the Central Andes. This work defines characteristics of a structural typology that represents this group of chapels, and develops recommendations for seismic-resistant reinforcement and intervention on historic buildings, taking as example 10 representative cases, using guidelines developed by Getty Seismic Adobe Project (GSAP) of earthquake resistant structural design, with performance based criteria instead of the traditional strength-based criteria. © 2006 Taylor & Francis Group.