Location and History
The Marmato mine is located in the Marmato gold district in the Caldas Department, a mountainous region approximately 80 kilometres south of the city of Medellin, Colombia. The Marmato mine is located by the Pan American Highway and supported by excellent infrastructure, including access to the national electricity grid that runs near the property.
Cerro El Burro, a prominent hill at Marmato, has been mined for nearly 600 years, and was historically divided into three contiguous mining titles with numerous licenses within them, including Zona Alta, Zona Baja, and Echandia. The Maruja Mine in the Zona Baja title was first developed between 1908 and 1925 by the Colombian Mining and Exploitation Company, which mined extensively in the upper levels from the haulage level on Level 18 at 1,160 metres (m) above sea level, and opened the Zancudo mine adit on Level 17, 50 m above Level 18. In 1925, the mines were expropriated and closed. In 1993 Mineros Nacionales S.A.S. began a 300 tonne per day (tpd) underground mine on Level 18. Mining has taken place continuously since then by a series of different owners in the area now known as the Upper Mine in the Zona Baja mining title. In 2012, GCM Mining Corp. (GCM Mining), a publicly listed Canadian company formerly known as Gran Colombia Gold Corp. (Gran Colombia Gold), and currently known as Aris Mining Corporation (Aris Mining), announced the discovery of a deep mineralization trend, now referred to as the Lower Mine, 300 metres below the then known resources in the Upper Mine.
Aris Mining has received approval from the Corporación Autónoma Regional del Caldas (Corpocaldas), the regional environmental authority in Colombia, of the Environmental Management Plan (PMA) which now includes development of the Marmato Lower Mine. This approval allows us to construct a new underground mine to access the wider porphyry mineralization in the Lower Mine, which allows for bulk mining methods.