Agua Azul is a well-known garimpo district in southeastern Para, Brazil.  The property consists of two exploration licenses comprising 11,457.6 hectares just west of the town of Agua Azul do Norte, 250 kms southwest of the regional center of Marabá.  An additional 27,147.6 hectares have been staked approximately 20km west of the Agua Azul property in the vicinity of numerous historic alluvial gold producers.  The area has excellent infrastructure and access.  State highway 279 transects the northern part of both licenses and the nearby airport at Ourilandia is serviced by daily flights from Belem via Carajas.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, over 5000 garimpeiros (artisanal miners) extracted several hundred thousand ounces of gold from minor drainages and shallow surface workings in bedrock within the license area.  Recently small scale miners have been exploiting a series of veins and silicified zones up to 8m meters wide that returned values up to 87.7g/t Au in grab samples. 

The area is underlain by a 2.8 billion year old complex of ultramafic rocks, orthogneisses and intrusions, which have subsequently been intruded by a 1.8 billion year old granitic suite.  The older ultramafic rocks host Vale's new Onça-Puma laterite nickel mine located roughly 50km to the northeast of the Agua Azul property.  The younger granites are similar in age and appearance to the host rocks of Magellan's Cuiú Cuiú deposits in the Tapajos region, roughly 670km to the west of Agua Azul.  Several sub-parallel northwest-striking gold-bearing structures have been identified across a width of approximately 3km, hosted both in the metamorphic complex and the younger granite.  Chip sampling across quartz veining and peripheral silicification zones in the Planta Pit at Agua Azul returned values up to 17.46 g/t Au across 5.4m.

A property-wide soil geochemistry survey is currently under way.