VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – Canadian gold producer Agnico Eagle has agreed to buy the Chipriona gold project, in Mexico, from TSX-V-listed Sonoro Metals for $4-million and a 1% net smelter return (NSR) royalty.

The NSR royalty may be bought by Agnico at any time for an additional $1.5-million. Chipriona comprises 515 ha of concessions located in the heart of the prolific Mulatos district, in the Sierra Madre gold belt of eastern Sonora state, next to Agnico’s La India mine and 6 km south-east of Agnico's Tarachi deposit.

Under terms of the sales agreement, Agnico will pay for the property in four tranches, comprising the initial instalment of $650 000 upon signing, and three additional sequential instalments of $650 000, $800 000 and $1.9-million, respectively, due over the coming months following registration of title at Mexico's Public Registry of Mining.

"The $4-million cash injection into Sonoro's treasury without any resulting share dilution provides ample capital for the ongoing exploration of the company's San Marcial project, also in Mexico, and the Hilltop project, in Alaska,” said Sonoro president and CEO Kenneth MacLeod.

The Chipriona concessions account for about 4% of Sonoro's total exploration portfolio of 14 351 ha.

Sonoro said its technical team is preparing for the 2017 exploration programme at the San Marcial gold/silver project, currently under option to buy by the company, located 20 km east of Timmins Gold's operating San Francisco mine, in the prolific Sonora-Mojave megashear geologic structure of Sonora state.

EXPLORATION TARGETS
The San Marcial property includes the original mine workings of the San Marcial and Soledad mines that were developed during the early 1900s.

Recent exploration by Sonoro has confirmed and expanded upon the presence of four anomalous zones within the 1 000 ha concessions. The company plans follow-up geological mapping and sampling in January, within the four main large gold anomalies, further to investigating three smaller gold anomalous areas. 

Sonoro is also earning a 60% interest in the 12 836 ha Hilltop gold project, in Alaska. A 2015 exploration programme conducted at Hilltop confirmed known gold mineralisation. Soils and trenching in an area of previous exploration exposed an emerging gold-in-soils footprint and included rock samples from new trenching with values to 19.45 g/t gold from continuous channel samples in flat-lying arsenopyrite-bearing quartz veins collected in Trench 5 from the 1 m to 2 m interval, in a zone that averaged 9.71 g/t gold from the interval 0 m to 4 m.

According to Sonoro, due diligence soil sampling at Hilltop South confirmed the anomalous nature of that area and expanded the footprint of anomalous gold in soils to 400 m by 1 800 m. Further exploration is planned for 2017.