Azure Minerals (ASX: AZS) says its first exploration programme at its 100%-owned Alacrán Project in Mexico has returned very high grades of silver, gold, copper, lead and zinc from sampling of mine dumps.
The company’s Managing Director Tony Rovira said these old mines are located between 1.5 to 2.0 kilometres south and southeast of the Cerro Alacrán porphyry-hosted copper-gold-molybdenum body.
The workings were identified by geological mapping undertaken by Azure’s former partner in the project, Teck Resources.
Mr Rovira said Azure’s work is the first modern sampling to have been undertaken at these locations and, importantly, no drilling has tested these old workings.
These mines focused on exploiting precious and base metal-rich veins hosted in volcanic and porphyry rocks. Mapping shows that such veins occur extensively throughout the southeast of the property with some individual veins mapped over strike lengths in excess of 500 metres.
The mine dumps comprise material mined from quartz-sulphide veins with abundant dump material exhibiting obvious copper, lead and zinc sulphide mineralisation and silver sulfosalts.
Twenty-one samples were collected, and sampling was deliberatively selective to determine grades of historically-mined ore.
Laboratory results returned very high grades with maximum values of 3,675g/t silver, 24.1g/t gold, 2.3% copper, 33.5% lead and 21.0% zinc.
Encouragingly, all 21 samples returned high grades in both precious and base metals.
Mr Rovira said this first-pass sampling is very encouraging and further systematic sampling and detailed mapping of the veins will commence shortly to provide targets for follow-up trenching and drilling.
Meanwhile, Azure is designing the next stage of drilling to increase mineral resources at the Loma Bonita gold-silver deposit. Previous resource drilling was suspended in late-2016 when Teck exercised a back-in right over the project. With Azure now having acquired all of Teck’s rights and regained 100% project ownership, the Company will look to expand the initial mineral resource estimate.
