Altamira Gold is a first mover in Brazil’s emerging gold-copper belt

• Brazil-focused gold explorer
• Multiple high-grade targets with significant resource upside
• Experienced management team with notable insider ownership   

What Altamira Gold does:

Altamira Gold Corp (CVE:ALTA) (OTCPINK:EQTRF) (FRA:T6UP) is focused on the exploration and development of gold projects within western central Brazil.

The Vancouver, British Columbia-based company holds nine projects comprising approximately 280,000 hectares within the prolific Juruena gold belt, which historically produced an estimated 7 to 10 million ounces of placer gold.

Altamira Gold has three high-priority projects in Brazil: Cajueiro, Apiacás, and Santa Helena.

Cajueiro, the company’s most advanced property, contains more than 14 kilometres (km) of drilling across 105 holes, and over 4 km of trenching completed to date across the 39,053-hectare claim package. A 2019 resource estimate showed 700,000 ounces of gold in the combined Measured, Indicated, and Inferred categories. Bulk sampling licenses have also been received for trial mining at Cajueiro.

Apiacás, meanwhile, is a highly prospective land package that consists of properties covering seven primary target areas and over 80,000 hectares. None of the Apiacás targets has ever been drilled out but trenching has returned consistent values of more than 5 grams per ton (g/t) gold. The company has said its near-term focus is the Mutum target, with widespread disseminated mineralization at surface.

And Santa Helena, which covers 58,000 hectares in the south-eastern portion of the Alta Floresta/Juruena gold-copper belt, is in close proximity to Anglo American’s newly-discovered Jaca target, which demonstrated the area’s potential to host significant copper porphyry deposits. The property has not been drilled previously.

Altamira Gold is led by CEO Michael Bennett, a geologist with over 30 years of industry experience in South America, having previously worked closely in joint ventures with Rio Tinto, Barrick and Goldfields of South Africa. Bennett is also Altamira’s largest shareholder, owning 8.8 million company shares.

How it is doing:

In March 2021, Altamira Gold said it had confirmed four high-grade gold-silver vein structures at its Apiacas project.

The miner revealed that the veins appear to extend over at least a one-kilometre strike length on the Mutum target, with surface grab samples returning values of up to 403.5 g/t gold, while recent channel samples included values of up to three metres at 10.4 g/t gold. Silver assays also returned high-grade values of up to 871 g/t. 

The company added that all of the veins originate from an area of disseminated gold mineralization, which was mapped over four square kilometres on surface.

In late 2020, Altamira announced that it had discovered a major new gold-in-soil anomaly in a greenfield area of the Cajueiro gold project. The 700 metres by 100 metres anomaly was discovered at the Maria Bonita area of the project, making it the largest anomaly found at Cajueiro so far.

The company completed three new north-south trending soil lines at Maria Bonita and 75% of the soil samples returned “highly anomalous” gold values over 100 parts per billion up to a maximum of 3.1 g/t gold in soils – higher than previous values found elsewhere at the Cajueiro resource area.

Earlier in that year, Altamira had reported “highly encouraging” channel sampling results from three new structures at Cajueiro, underlining the potential to expand the current resource.

Results included an intercept of 7 metres at 1.32 g/t gold at Baldo 3, which is an east-north-east (ENE) structure about 350 metres north of the known Baldo 1 zone and appears to be parallel to Baldo 1.

On the financial front, Altamira closed an oversubscribed financing in February 2021, raising C$4 million to explore its Cajueiro, Apiacas and Santa Helena projects. About C$1.5 million of the offering was purchased by asset management group Crescat.

Inflection points:

• Drilling the Apiacás, Cajueiro, and Santa Helena projects  
• Plant construction at the Cajueiro project expected in 1H 2021  
• Near-term production at Cajueiro

What the boss says:

Commenting on the company’s channel sampling results from its Cajueiro gold project, Altamira Gold CEO Michael Bennett said in a statement: “The channel results from the three new mineralized structures in the Baldo area are highly encouraging and contain several high-grade intervals, confirming our belief that there is significant potential to expand the present 43-101 resource within the central area at Cajueiro.”

Bennett added: “The current resource corresponds to approximately 1% of the project area and we expect to identify further new zones both within and outside the resource area once the stripping of surface cover commences in advance of production.”

Contact Sean at [email protected]

Story by ProactiveInvestors