With the acquisition of Alta Floresta Gold in April 2016, Altamira Gold TSXV:ALTA acquired a 100% interest in six gold properties comprising over 186,000 hectares of licence area, and four production licenses, in the prolific Alta Floresta Gold Belt of central Brazil.
Since then, Altamira has added additional claims and increased its land position to approximately 290,000 hectares with the addition of the Santa Helena and Apiacas, Firmino and Sao Joazinho licenses.
Altamira’s advanced Cajueiro project has NI 43-101 resources of 5.66Mt @ 1.02 g/t gold for a total of 185,000 oz in the Indicated Resource category and 12.66Mt @ 1.26 g/t gold for a total of 515,000oz in the Inferred Resource category. We recently caught up with the management team at the Swiss Mining Institute in Zurich.
The Alta Floresta Gold Belt produced an estimated 7-10Moz of placer gold belt during the gold rush of the 1980’s when gold was washed from streams in a number of areas. All of Altamira’s key projects were historic placer gold producers including Cajueiro, Santa Helena and Apiacas.
The Apiacas district which is now 100% controlled by Altamira, was the largest placer gold producer in the belt and produced an estimated 1 million ounces of gold from streams.
Cajueiro remains area of primary focus for Altamira
In addition, the Cajuiero project (100% Altamira) is currently the largest known gold deposit with a 43-101 compliant resource and is expected to grow with additional exploration.
The region largely comprises ranch land and has excellent access with an extensive road network. The main town in the area is Alta Floresta which has daily flights to the state capital of Cuiaba and connections to Sao Paulo.
The Cajuiero project is located approximately 80km from the airport at Alta Floresta and can be reached by road in 1.5 hours. The Santa Helena Project is located on the main BR-163 highway which is the principal north-south route in this part of Mato Grosso. The Apiacas project is accessed by asphalt and gravel roads from Alta Floresta and travel time is approximately three hours.
Altamira is currently actively engaged in exploration for gold and copper at St Helena, in Matto Grosso state. This work carries on alongside the exploration at Cajueiro, which is still designated Altamira’s main area of focus.
Magnetic anomalies detected at Santa Helena
Ground magnetic work has been completed at three further copper-in-soil anomalies at the Santa Helena project, and has revealed the presence of coincident magnetic anomalies. These coincident copper-in-soil and magnetic targets add to the coincident anomaly already defined and have signatures that are considered to be consistent with inferred porphyry settings.
Altamira reported last month that a drill programme is being designed to test these targets. Exploration continues in the south of the project area to follow-up widely spaced copper-in-soil anomalies.
The presence of undrilled-tested copper-in-soil anomalism in this tropical weathered landscape, coincident with well-defined magnetic features, reminiscent of intrusive bodies and a local and regional structural setting permissive for porphyry stock emplacement are strong positives for the miner.
Together with the presence of mineralized porphyry-like stock works in limited surface exposure, trenching and initial drilling of what appears to have been the margins of one or more potentially copper-mineralized porphyry stocks is as good as it gets in terms of drill readiness for a potential cluster of porphyries on early-stage exploration plays in largely covered terrain.
Altamira now has an impressive inventory of drill-ready options to test for porphyry-style copper mineralization. The regional structural location, and widespread association with large-scale alteration features, consistent with porphyry-style intrusive systems are very encouraging at this stage of exploration.
The design of a scout drilling programme is underway, the company said last month.