Verena’s Volta Grande gold property in Brazil grows 66.7%

Exploration for gold deposits in the Volta Grande area of the eastern Amazon region of Brazil dates back to the Portuguese conquests of the 16th century and has continued sporadically to the present.

Today Verena Minerals (VML-V) is picking up the trail of its predecessors with some encouraging results.

The Toronto-based junior has raised the property’s indicated resource by 66.7% over its 2005 resource estimate to 400,000 oz. gold.

A new National Instrument 43-101 calculation demonstrates an indicated resource of 13.5 million tonnes grading 0.92 gram gold per tonne (using a 0.5 gram gold per tonne cutoff).

The inferred resource has expanded to 54.5 million tonnes grading 0.93 gram gold per tonne for total contained gold of 1.6 million oz., an increase of 8.9%.

“We believe hitting the 2 million oz. number gives us enough of a basis to advance to an engineering scoping evaluation to determine a development plan for the project,” says Ron Stewart, Verena’s president and chief executive.

“We’re quite enthusiastic that we have something tangible and a legitimate deposit with economic potential to move forward.”

Verena based the estimate on 33,198 metres of drilling and it incorporates the results of work completed in 2006 and 2007.

The cutoff grade was calculated on a gold price of US$750 per oz., and a 93% gold recovery rate.

“It has good exploration potential,” Stewart says, adding that he is “optimistic it’s non-refractory.”

The Volta Grande property is about 60 km southeast of the city of Altamira in northern Brazil, along the southern bank of the Xing River, a major tributary to the Amazon River.

The region has been developed primarily as cattle-ranching country, but is close to dense equatorial jungle that is home to black panthers, pumas, and primates.

Past operators TVX Gold, now part of Kinross Gold, and Battle Mountain Exploration, now part of Newmont Mining, explored the property from 1996 to 1998.

Their efforts amounted to more than 27,000 metres of combined core, augur, and reverse circulation drilling and several thousand channel and soil samples.

Preliminary metallurgical work indicated that Volta Grande’s mineralization was amenable to conventional processing methods, with gold recoveries of up to 95% in bottle roll tests.

Verena optioned the property in 2004 and is the operator.

The shear-hosted resource at Volta Grande is contained in eight areas, six of which have been developed by artisanal workings.

Within these areas, there are many narrow zones of high-grade gold mineralization, open along strike and at depth, with potential for expansion, the company’s 2004 technical report states.

The property hosts two types of gold: primary gold in intrusive rocks and secondary gold in an extensive saprolitic zone overlying the primary mineralization.

Kinross Gold holds 7.5% of Verena and is earning an interest in the company’s Monte do Carmo and Patrocinio gold projects.

On the TSX Venture Exchange, Verena is trading at about 27 a share.

The company has a 52-week trading range of 23 to 56 and 93.5 million shares outstanding.

Volta Grande is just one of Verena’s four active projects in Brazil, which include gold, diamonds and the gemstone alexandrite.

“Brazil is an excellent country to work in,” Stewart says. “It’s got a good workable mining law and supportive government both at the national and state level, a very well developed internal mining community and a well-trained workforce. And it’s very supportive of capital development projects.”