Old Colombian mine yielding promising results for Galway

Galway Resources (GWY-V) may have initially grabbed the markets attention via its California project’s proximity to Ventana Gold’s (VEN-T) and Greystar Resources’(GSL-T) assets, but lately the company has been busy proving up a different project altogether.

With the recent acquisition of one of Colombia’s oldest and largest producing mine – El Volcan – Galway has been sinking dollars into bringing the mineralization around the mine up to modern geological standards.

The mine sits on its larger Reina De Oro property, which was acquired in January of this year and which sits roughly 8-km southeast of Galway’s California project.

Galway wasted little time in testing its newly acquired ground as it has already released two sets of channel results in February alone.

Those results have Galway confident that it has discovered a significant high-grade gold zone that still has plenty of ounces yet to give.

The El Volcan Mine has been the site of gold mining since the 1590’s and is the largest gold producer in the California-Vetas-Surata gold mining districts.

The mine is made up of two main levels, with eight mineralized quartz veins currently being mined by locals.

Galway is focusing on 2,000 of the 5,000 meters of historical underground drifting that has been done by local miners as the remaining 3,000 meters is currently not accessible – Galway, however, says it does to plan to drill there in the future.

Its latest channel samples come from eight mineralized structures, all of which were done on the lower level of the mine.

Highlight grades included 70.1 metres strike length with a 0.9 meter true width returning 104.8 grams per tonne gold; 1,374.8 grams gold per tonne over a strike length of 5 meters with a true width of 0.8 metres and 223.8 grams gold over a strike length of 25 meters with a true width of 0.9 metres.

“Several of the veins appear to be getting richer over longer intervals when compared with prior results,” Robert Hinchcliffe, Galway’s President and chief executive said in a statement.
Galway says all of the veins are open along strike horizontally and to depth.

The mineralized zone is composed of quartz veins together with splay veins that are spatially associated with shear zones hosted in porphyry and metamorphic gneiss, Galway says.

Locals have and are continuing to mine at El Volcan from the surface down to roughly 250 metres and over a 570 meter vein length. Galway estimates that 30% of the area has been mined out.

While it is still early days, Galway believes that the steep slope of the veins and the highly competent wall rocks makes the zone ideal for bulk mining methods, but it says, there is also potential for open pit mining.

Galway is funding its exploration activities from a recently completed private placement that netted it roughly $12 million.

In Toronto on February 25 the company’s shares were up 9% or 9¢ to $1.05 on 1.88 million shares traded.