Site visit to Santo Domingo Cu-Au project in Argentina

I completed a site visit in the middle of April to the Santo Domingo copper-gold porphyry project in the province of San Juan, Argentina about 150 km from the capital in the Valle Fertil. The porphyry-style mineralization was first identified in 2007 and previous workers ended up focusing on the gold occurrences.

The project is at a low altitude in a topographically-challenged block of the uplifted Sierra Pampeanas basement rocks, which, incidentally, also hosts the Bajo de Alumbrera copper-gold mine, which operated at a rate of 110,000 tonnes per day from 1997 to 2018 and is also located about 100 kilometers east of the Andes, too.

The attraction of the visit is that Santo Domingo is an undrilled, grassroots, porphyry-related system with several targets, including a porphyry copper target (El Arriero) and precious metal veins (El Arriero West). 

After a 2-hour horseback ride, we arrived at the El Arriero target, a 1-kilometer-long porphyry-related, phyllic alteration zone (quartz-sericite-pyrite now iron oxides).

Critically, there are outcrops within the phyllic zone with clear evidence of potassic-altered (K-feldspar-magnetite-biotite) porphyry copper mineralization. Structurally controlled sheeted veins of magnetite were also noted.

In addition, we also reviewed an outcrop of sheeted veins peripheral to the phyllic alteration halo that carry anomalous gold mineralization (El Arriero West - 19.7 meters grading 2.1 g/t Au).

A few months ago, Royal Road Minerals made a strategic move out of Nicaragua and Colombia into Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina with a focus on copper exploration.

It has signed an option to earn 100% of the Santo Domingo project for US$2.5 million and hopes to drill test the project for the first time in July 2023 after building road access to the El Arriero prospect.

As the site visit confirms the presence of a porphyry system that has yet to be drill tested in a similar setting to a previously operating mine (Bajo de la Alumbrera), I will be following the drill program and its results closely.

[I do not own shares of Royal Road Minerals]