Corina Gold Project

The Corina Gold Project comprises a block of licenses totalling 8,300 hectares in area in the Antabamba region, Apurimac Department, Southern Peru.

The geological setting is a belt of Tertiary-age volcanic rocks that also host to Hochschild’s Pallancata and Immaculada mining operations and past producer Selene, with Lara’s main targets located approximately 15km north (approximately 25km by road) of the mill at Selene, which serves the Pallancata mine.

At Corina the host rocks are mostly felsic tuffs, cut by an E-W fault, with brecciation and veining that has been mapped at surface over several kilometres. Mineralization is typically hosted by zones of brecciation with silicification, stockworks and quartz veining, within two sub-parallel structures denominated Corina and Micky. The Corina structure is mineralized but has so far returned lower grades and carries grey-white quartz and pyrite. The Micky structure has returned better grades, associated with chalcedonic quartz and coliform textures typical of low sulphidation epithermal alteration systems. The current working hypothesis is that the better intercepts on the Micky structure represent shoots that plunge shallowly to the east (comparable to the comportment of the Pablo-Yurika silver vein at Pallancata and the Angela gold vein at Immaculada).

The property was under option to Hochschild until late 2022, with a total of 13,045 metres of diamond drilling completed. The first drill program at Corina in 2019 intercepted a number of mineralized structures with high gold and silver values (see Lara news release of October 1, 2019 for details). The Covid-19 pandemic delayed follow-up work, but drilling resumed in later 2020 (see Lara news release of February 2, 2021 for details).

The Corina and Micky vein system is only partly tested and considered open both along strike and at depth. There are a number of other veins on the property identified by surface mapping and geophysics that remain largely untested.

The Hochschild Corina-Micky intercepts are summarised in the table below:

Diamond drilling from 2019 was supervised by Hochschild’s exploration geologists based at site, who then take the core down to the exploration base in Calhuanca, where it is photographed, logged and the altered sections sampled. One quarter of core is sent to their certified internal laboratory at the Selene plant nearby and one-half of the core is sent to ALS Chemex in Lima. The results reported in the table above are all from the independent ALS Chemex laboratory. In addition to running all the samples through these two laboratories, Ares follows the standard QAQC procedures of inserting blank, reference and duplicate samples into its sample lots.

Diamond drilling from 2020-21 was supervised by Hochschild’s brownfields technical team, based at the Pallancata Mine. The core samples were submitted for analysis at Hochschild’s internal laboratory at the Selene Plant nearby, along with QAQC reference samples (blanks, standards and duplicates).

Michael Bennell, Lara’s Vice President Exploration and a Fellow of the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM), is a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects and has approved the technical disclosure and verified the technical information in this news release.

Presentation