The 59,673 hectare Aurea Norte Project is an early stage gold exploration project situated on the north-west extension of the Guerrero Gold Belt(the GGB), an intrusion hosted disseminated gold and gold skarn environment. It completely surrounds Goldcorp's Ana Paula project and is adjacent to Teck Cominco's Morelos North project that hosts the El Limon-Los Guajes 3.2 M Oz gold deposit. Numerous GGB style gold showings occur on the Aurea Norte project, all with similar characteristics to the known GGB deposits. All are in various early to mid-level stages of exploration with an objective of advancing the project towards discovery.
Today Aurea Mining, Teck Cominco, Goldcorp and Grupo Mexico are the principal participants in the GGB, which currently hosts a gold inventory of 12 million ounces, an inventory that continues to grow with ongoing exploration and mine development by all participants. The first mine to come from this activity, Goldcorp's Los Filos Project, began producing in early 2007. Los Filos project contains 5.04 million ounces of gold in all categories.
Drilling at Aurea Norte intersected 1.11 gm/tonne gold over 16.8m in the first test program for the project in 2005. In 2007, a 2770m drill program was completed as a preliminary test of several targets and as a follow up to previous drilling. Results have been very encouraging to date and all GGB exploration efforts will be focused on this property for the remainder of this year. Current exploration activities include follow up of a PhotoSat satellite imagery interpretation with stream sediment sampling, ongoing regional exploration and follow up mapping and sampling of key target areas. Results from this program will be used to plan further drilling and geophysics in 2008.
