As in many other countries, Peru has the Water Quality Standard (WQS) asthe primary tool for managing and diagnosing water resources. Ananalysis variable by variable to define water quality as poor or goodwas applied by setting concentration limits. A second group of toolscommonly used are Biotic Indexes based on tolerance of benthicmacroinvertebrates to pollution, that reflect the impacts caused by agroup of variables, even though they cannot identify which variablesdetermine the viability of the ecosystem. This research proposes toinclude the Stable States approach to evaluate the ecological integrityin central Andes rivers to explore an alternative approach with thecapacity to represent a broader number of factors through multivariateanalysis. A ten-year database of biological and physical-chemicalvariables measured in five Andean rivers were evaluated. Our resultssuggest these rivers fluctuate into two seasonal stable states (wet anddry season), accounting for approximately 31% of the systemvariability. In the wet season, the equilibrium of the state wasdominated by the highest levels of suspended solids, turbidity,coliform, phosphorus, and some metals. During the dry season, the keyvariables were dissolved oxygen, flow, physical habitat, and biotic anddiversity indexes. Likewise, there seems to be a third alternative stateinfluenced by human pressures because of variables that exceed the WQS.Regarding water quality, the concentrations of coliforms, phosphorus,and lead usually exceeded the limits in two stations, but not everyyear. The ecological condition was better represented by ABI index thanEPT.