November 3 (SeeNews) - Canada-based gold exploration and development company Medgold Resources said on Thursday it had been granted five exploration licences for precious and base metal mineralization in Serbia.
A block of three contiguous licences totalling 300 sq km is located in the southeast of the country, bordering Macedonia and Bulgaria, while the two remaining licences, each of 100 sq km, are located approximately 50 km to the north of the southern licence block, the company said in a statement on its website.
"We are very pleased to have received our first exploration licences in Serbia. They cover large areas of highly prospective ground and are under-explored for gold and silver", Dan James, president of Medgold, said.
Exploration activities on these licences will be fully funded through Medgold's strategic alliance with Fortuna Silver Mines, the company noted.
The licences are located in the Serbo-Macedonian Massif ("SMM"), a belt of crustal rocks that runs through Serbia along a north-south axis, extending southwards through Macedonia and Bulgaria and into Greece.
The three contiguous licences are located along the Macedonian and Bulgarian borders, approximately 40 km southeast of the city of Vranje, in southeast Serbia.
Fairly extensive exploration was completed by the Yugoslav government in the 1960s and 1970s for lead and zinc. Precious metals are often referenced in the historical and archival exploration documentation, but were not the focus of any exploration efforts, nor systematically documented.
The two other licences are located approximately 25 km due east of the city of Leskovac. Almost no previous exploration has been undertaken in these areas.
Recently, Medgold purchased an exploration dataset from Dundee Precious Metals, which had in previous years conducted regional exploration campaigns over parts of these licence areas. The data include regional stream sediment sampling results and a number of fairly detailed soil sampling grids over historical showings and gold-anomalous stream sediment and rock chip results. The data are currently being reviewed and will be followed-up with a series of ground-truthing and quality-control exercises, Medgold said.
"In the coming months, field crews will be undertaking licence-wide reconnaissance over all licences, as well as commencing a series of systematic soil and stream sediment sampling programs and a detailed review of the historical data", it added.
Medgold is a European-focused, Toronto-listed exploration and development company targeting gold properties in northwest Iberia and the under-explored gold provinces of southern Europe.
In June, Medgold said it had raised $1.5 million (1.4 million euro) to fund project-generating exploration in Serbia.
($=0.901071 euro)