Surveying Heritage with Affordable Yet Accurate Methods. A Study Case from Arequipa, Peru

One of the key aspects to keep adequate management and preservation of the built heritage is to maintain an adequate registry of the monuments. In many cases, state-of-the-art technologies are being used to develop accurate and rapid surveys, which utilize sophisticated high-cost equipment. However, in developing countries that possess a rich heritage, many of these technologies are beyond the reach of their possibilities, having to rely on manual, inefficient, and inaccurate systems that are still used. This research shows several alternatives of relatively low-cost techniques that allow a reliable data collection of built heritage, without losing the richness of the details of the historical architecture. To do this, a comparison is made between different methods of manual, semi-automatic, and automatic data collection, analyzing their costs and benefits. Subsequently, a comparative survey is carried out using the most efficient and affordable methods, proposing a methodology that leads to the improvement of surveys in historical buildings without this entailing a significant increase in costs.