The Golden Hill Property comprises of one concession totaling 4,468 hectares and offers direct access through the historic mining town of San Ramon

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Underground Workings at La Escarcha, Golden Hill Property (Credit: CNW Group/Mantaro Silver Corp.)

MANTARO SILVER CORP. (TSXV: MSLV) (FSE: 9TZ) (the “Company”) is pleased to announce that it has entered into a property option agreement (the “Option Agreement”) with Minera Golden Hill S.R.L. (“MGH”) and Luis Fernando Kinn Cortez (the “Optionor”) to acquire up to an 80% interest in the advanced Golden Hill Property (“Golden Hill”), located in the underexplored, orogenic Bolivian Shied, Bolivia. The Golden Hill Property comprises of one concession totaling 4,468 hectares and offers direct access through the historic mining town of San Ramon.

Dr. Chris Wilson, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mantaro states, “Golden Hill is an advanced stage gold-focused project with significant exploration upside.  A drill ready orogenic gold project in Bolivia is an excellent complement to our existing high-grade silver assets in Peru. Greenstone hosted gold systems, such as Golden Hill, are very attractive exploration targets. Not only is it common for major deposits to occur in clusters, but individual deposits are defined by multiple high-grade shoots over a strike length of 1 to >2 kilometers and depths of >1 kilometer.”

Golden Hill:  Permitted to Drill

The Golden Hill Property is owned by a private Bolivian Company and is fully permitted for mining and drilling. Prior to the option agreement with Mantaro, one of the main quartz veins at La Escarcha was being mined at a rate of up to 25 tonnes per day to a depth of 60 meters.  The mined material was processed at site and gold recovered using a combination of simple gravity circuits. The mine permit at Golden Hill allows for production to be increased subject to the Company completing its own economic studies on the project and to sufficiently fund any upgrades.

Dr. Wilson further comments, “the style of mineralization at Golden Hill, and its regional structural setting, makes for an extremely robust exploration target. The fact that Golden Hill is permitted for mining and mine expansion, and immediate drilling, underpins the value of Golden Hill as an advanced exploration property.”

Mantaro’s acquisition strategy, which was utilized in Peru, is to pursue high-grade deposits that have potential at depth.  Golden Hill is a high-grade gold mineralized system of a style that hosts some of the world’s major gold mines.  It has been exploited in a small scale manner to 60 vertical meters with increasing gold grade at depth over widths of 1 to 5 meters. The underground dataset significantly de-risks the near surface exploration potential and drill targeting.

Property Geology

The Golden Hill concession is centered on a broadly north-south trending regional structure (see Figure 1) that hosts the La Escarcha underground mine and Gabby, the Garrapatillia and Brownfields workings and gold-bearing vein occurrences in its western hanging wall. The same structure hosts numerous saprolite gold and hard rock gold deposits to the north and south of the Golden Hill concession over a strike length of at least 25 kilometers — underpinning the significant control the structure exerts on gold mineralization.

A northwest-trending splay of this structure hosts areas of alluvial and saprolitic/hard rock workings within the Golden Hill concession and immediately to the north. At least six strike kilometers of these structures are known within the concession — in addition to the four kilometers between La Escarcha and Brownfield which have been mapped in detail. Known mineralization and surface anomalism is open along strike on all structures.

Mineralization between La Escarcha and Brownfields is characterized by a series of broadly parallel, north-south trending, very steeply dipping quartz veins that are between 1 to 5 meters wide. Mineralization is hosted in mafic metavolcanics, at the contact of metavolcanics and metasediments, and within metasediments.

Veins are well exposed in underground workings at La Escarcha where they comprise multiphase white quartz and slivers of wall rock (see Figure 3) which are fracture oxidized. Veins are up to 5 meters wide and contain significant visible gold.

Mine staff have reported that gold grades increase downwards from surface to the -60 m level which is currently under limited development. Most gold appears to be free hosted in fractures within quartz and pyrite.

Regional Geology

The Bolivian shield is larger than the Abitibi greenstone belt in Canada, yet the Bolivian shield has produced <10 Moz Au compared to 170+ Moz Au in the Abitibi from over 100 mines since 1901. Similarly, the gold endowment of the West African shield, the greenstone belts of NE South America (Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and Brazil) and the Yilgarn province of Western Australia is much greater than equivalent areas of the Bolivian shield as the Bolivian shield remains largely under-explored.

As with other greenstone belts and mineralized provinces worldwide, mineralization in the Bolivian shield is hosted along major crustal structures which juxtapose different lithologies against each other (resulting in competency contracts across the structure). Regional-scale structures serves to focus mineralizing fluids, whilst rocks of different competency, provide a regime for both ductile and brittle deformation and thus creation of space for deposition of quartz, pyrite and gold. Mafic volcanics are especially favorable hosts due to the high iron content which reacts with sulphur in mineralizing fluids to form pyrite — causing gold to precipitate from the mineralizing fluids. Golden Hill is located on a crustal scale structure which hosts at least six other significant gold occurrences and deposits (see Figure 5), at the juxtaposition of several different lithologies, including meta-volcanics with abundant iron-rich ferromagnesian minerals. From a regional perspective and comparison with other greenstone belts worldwide, Golden Hill is an attractive project.

Planned Work Program

La Escarcha, Gaby and Brownfield are drill ready targets.  Ahead of drilling, Mantaro is planning to channel sample all underground levels at la Escarcha, in addition to the 200 kilogram bulk sample that has already been taken for bench-scale metallurgical testing at SGS Lakefield.  This initial program will assist Mantaro in fine tuning drill targeting.  Mantaro also has the option of continuing development and exploration from the existing underground workings.

A concession-wide mapping and rock-chip grab sampling program is planned for early September in order to focus regional soil and trench sampling programs. Alluvial and saprolite workings are much more extensive than known hard-rock targets and underground workings, which suggests that gold mineralization along regional structures is more extensive than currently known. Defining the source of this alluvial and saprolitic gold will be an important focus of Mantaro’s field work.

Source: Company Press Release