It's hard to be a gold bug or grass roots mining stock buff and not have an interest in buried treasures or lost gold mines. I think that is what makes prospecting exciting. In a lot of cases it's not the treasure that you hope find but all the excitement that goes into the actual searching for the treasure. I tend to think that with the true prospector it's more the adventure than it is the reward. The reward at the end if found, will just be used to help to fund the next lost treaure search.
I'm always searching out small mining plays that could end up having the potential of a worthy deposit and once in awhile you stumble onto some companies that are doing some extra ordinary things. Take Aurania Resources Ltd ARU for instance. Here is a company that is what could be called the true prospecting explorer. This company is actually looking for ancient lost cities of gold in Ecuador. The Lost Cities or known as the Cutucu Project, is located in the Jurassic Metallogenic Belt in the eastern foothills of the Andes mountain range of southeastern Ecuador. Of course on their website they state that the Lost Cities Project is not a treasure hunt but rather the workings of a "credentialed and respected university Professor and two PhD geologists with world class discoveries in Ecuador already under their belts."
The company CEO is Keith Barron. In 2001 he privately co-founded Ecuador gold explorer Aurelian Resources Inc., which was listed on the TSX-V in 2003 and found the Fruta del Norte gold discovery in 2006. That company was bought by Kinross Gold in 2008 for $1.2 billion. Today he is active with Aurania doing research and exploration for two lost cities known as Logrono de los Caballeros and Sevilla del Oro. It had been documented by old Spanish documents that there were seven rich cities of gold. Five of these cities have been found. The last city to be found was found by hunters in the jungle in 1981. It was written that the had been abandoned in 1603 after an epidemic killed most of the native workers. The discovery of this old city in 1981 let ot a gold rush where approximately 25,000 miners started back mining the area. Within a few months at the site of the this mine there were about 75 different operations. This lost city produced 2.7 million ounces of gold on the record between 1981-2000 an no one knows how much was sold into the black market.
These days the company is active with Landsat imagery study designed to determine the tectonic framework of the Cordillera de Cutucu through the identification of the interplay between faults and folds. Also airborne magnetic and radiometric survey by helicopter in order to identify porphyry systems through the detection of the magnetic core and coincident potassic alteration. The company also intends to do stream sediment sampling campaign to cover the main river basins within the permit area.
On March 15. 2018 the company issued a news release stating that the company had found a potential porphyry system at Cutucu. In the press release, Aurania's president, Dr. Richard Spencer, commented: "We are using the same stream sediment sampling technique in our Lost Cities -- Cutucu project that was instrumental in the mid-1990s discovery of large porphyry copper and copper-gold deposits located just a few tens of kilometres south of our property boundary. Aurania's airborne magnetometer survey detected a cluster of magnetic features that we believe are the buried magnetic cores of porphyries, and our exploration team recently discovered surface rock exposures of quartz-sericite-pyrite which represents an alteration shell that would typically enclose porphyry-style mineralization. This type of alteration further suggests that the target lies at a reasonably shallow depth. Since numerous similar magnetic features have been identified by the geophysical survey elsewhere across the project, we are now more confident of the potential for these to be due to porphyry bodies as well."
Aurania has 28 million shares with a 52 week trading range of $1.50 low and a $7.60 high.
If you enjoyed this article, please feel free to share. When seeking out mining stocks always use Due Diligence and see our Disclaimer and be sure to sign up for our free news letter located on the right hand side of this page.
