Santiago Precious Metals has acquired a wide range of exploration properties in the mountainous regions of the more politically stable regions of South America, especially in Chile and Argentina. We also provide our services to third-parties in Bolivia, Columbia, Ecuador and Peru on a consultancy basis.
We focus on territories that are located neighbouring or near to existing mines or proven reserves. This enables us to increase the probability of discovering high-value reserves of precious metals whilst significantly reducing the costs of development.
Santiago Precious Metals believes there is an exceptional opportunity to discover and expand reserves at our existing projects. Our exploration budget is geared towards near term resource accumulation and providing support for early stage exploration in our core territories.
High in the Andes Mountains in the border region between Argentina and Chile, Santiago Precious Metals’ Valle de las Estrellas project is located in the San Juan Province of Argentina. The territory is at an elevation of 2,800 to 4,800 metres, within 40Km of an established gold mine with proven reserves exceeding 10 million ounces of gold, in addition to other precious metals.
Santiago Precious Metals’ Valle de las Estrellas project includes 2,934 hectares of high Andean terrain in the West of Argentina within 400km of Santiago. The terrain includes large porphyry and epithermal features joined with classic porphyry copper-gold type mineralisation. These features are communally located in the Southern Andean Miocene diorite porphyry intrusive systems.
Santiago Precious Metals has undertaken exploration activity at the site, focussing on Valle de las Estrellas Norte and Valle de las Estrellas Central locations within the property. On the northern boundaries of the property where drilling and trenching is traversed with extensive copper-gold-silver mineralization intervals, assessments conducted by Santiago Precious Metals included 593.32 averaging 0.22g/t gold, 3.3 g/t silver and 0.11% copper. In addition there are four supplementary targets in the southern part of the territory, which include a massive anomaly, which warrant further exploration although initial positive surface sampling results have been obtained.
Recently Santiago Precious Metals has commenced negotiation of additional territories on an adjacent 1,994 hectare property in Chile’s Frontera District in order that we may extend the exploration beyond our existing territory to follow mineral veins. The property is at altitudes ranging from 2,850 to 5,150 metres above sea level.
Valle de las Estrellas is located in a belt of hydrothermally transformed rocks usually related to high-level intrusions and sub-volcanic hydrothermal activity. The area also features probable porphyry copper-gold and precious metal epithermal mineral deposits. The San Juan region’s topography is extensive volcanic units and intrusives dating from the Middle-Miocene period. Our initial mapping of the terrain suggests that the Valle de las Estrellas property consists of Oligocene, and Middle-Miocene age volcanic rocks, underlain with the Permian age Choiyoi Group bedrock, which are faulted against volcanic rocks of the Tertiary period.
The Valle de las Estrellas property has a porphyry interior which is an unprotected potassic and propylitic altered core with modest copper-gold-silver mineralisation lodged in 17 Ma microdiorite and 26.5 Ma Tilitobreccias. Sampling of rock and talus, trenching, ground magnetic surveys, and 1,500 metre core sampling has identified high concentrations of gold. Further studies including surface geochemistry delineates a +400 ppm copper and +275 ppb gold anomaly over 1,350 metres of strike length in a north-south bearing and 400 metres width east-west, extending in the direction of the Chilean-Argentina border. A further anomalous area contains high concentrations of gold (up to 4.3 ppm), molybdenum (up to 330 ppm), and silver (up to 33.7 ppm). Sampling coverage to date has been conducted at 40 metre spacing.
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