District geology · Sierra Madre Occidental
The San Blas Mining District: epithermal gold in Mexico’s Sierra Madre
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One of the world’s great precious-metal belts
The Sierra Madre Occidental is a 200–300 km wide Tertiary volcanic province running 1,300 km southeast from the U.S. border — among the largest epithermal precious-metal provinces on Earth and host to most of Mexico’s gold and silver deposits. Its low-sulphidation systems include some of the deposit class’s global benchmarks; within the province, the San Dimas camp alone has reported production and resources on the order of 9 million ounces of gold and hundreds of millions of ounces of silver. Mining here dates to the Spanish colonial era, and Sinaloa’s districts — San Blas among them, active since at least the 1880s — carry that lineage.
District architecture
Calderas and NE-trending structures
The San Blas district, in Sinaloa’s far north near El Fuerte, is characterized by volcanic-hosted, hot-spring-type, low-sulphidation epithermal Au–Ag deposits — veins, breccias and occasional replacements, much of it bonanza-style, with quartz–sericite–carbonate–chlorite alteration. Regional mapping outlines a crudely circular, ~12-km ring of andesite-porphyry intrusive centers — a postulated caldera — cut by a swarm of NE-trending dilatant normal faults. Every significant deposit and silicified zone mapped in the area sits on one of those NE structures.
Two historic camps frame the neighborhood:
- Aquincuari, 9 km east of Charay: ten mines and prospects within a 2 × 2.5 km camp, all fault-controlled within large silicified envelopes. Its two principal mines reportedly graded 6.8 and 16.0 g/t Au over 1.4–2.0 m widths, worked to depths beyond 100 m.
- Jecacahui, 6 km southeast: a 1-km NNE-trending fault system with three prospects including a past producer, in quartz veins carrying gold, silver and copper.
Neither camp has seen modern systematic exploration — a statement true of much of the district, which is precisely what makes it interesting. Sinaloa more broadly has drawn renewed institutional exploration investment over the past decade as the industry re-rates Mexico’s epithermal belts.
Where Charay sits
The center of the caldera, on its own NE structure
The Charay Project (Mina El Padre) occupies the center of the postulated caldera, on a NE-trending structure of its own — the El Padre vein — with the geology, textures and metal zonation of the district’s deposit class fully expressed: colloform banded chalcedonic quartz, a silica cap, oxide-to-sulphide transition near 50 m, and grades that strengthen downward. Nineteen core holes averaged 20.3 g/t Au and 123.7 g/t Ag over 1.29 m true width in the top 50 m, with the system open in every direction and an adjacent 500 × 200 m silicified breccia untested at depth. The full drill dataset →
In a district where the historic camps were mined to +100 m on grades a fraction of these, Charay is the rare San Blas asset that is titled, drilled, metallurgically proven and past-producing — and available. Why it’s for sale →
Underwrite the district’s best-documented asset.
Titled, drilled, check-assayed and past-producing — with full documentation available to qualified parties.