Cerrado Gold advances exploration program at Minera Don Nicolás project in Argentina

A year ago, Toronto-based Cerrado Gold (TSXV: CERT) acquired 100% of the Minera Don Nicolás (MDN) property in southern Argentina from a group of private investors. The project, about 1,600 km southwest of Buenos Aires in the Patagonian province of Santa Cruz, has nine pits, three of which are currently in production, and about twelve high-priority exploration targets. MDN has been producing small amounts of gold intermittently since 2017, and has a central carbon-in-leach mill with a processing capacity of 1,000 tonnes per day. But it was the exploration potential across Cerrado’s 333,400-hectare concession in the Deseado Massif that really caught the imagination of the company’s CEO and co-chairman Mark Brennan. Most of the drilling completed by the previous owners was targeted at open-pittable targets and to shallow depths of less than 100 metres from surface. “When we acquired MDN, there hadn’t been any drilling done in five years, so our first and foremost goal was to update the [historic] resource estimate,” he said. “This region is rich with deposits and we saw a tremendous upside for resource expansion at MDN.”