Advance Metals (ASX: AVM) has commenced a maiden 4,500-metre diamond drilling campaign at its wholly owned Gavilanes silver project in Mexico.
The company will focus on extending high-grade mineralisation down dip and along strike, testing priority targets at the peripheral El Nopal prospect to the southeast and the La Cruz and La Tuna prospects to the west.
These targets could potentially identify additional mineralised zones beyond the current foreign estimate and support Advance’s broader strategy to grow and upgrade its Mexican silver portfolio.
A site-based team has spent the past month establishing access and constructing drill pads across the initial priority target areas.
Low-Cost Acquisition
Advance acquired Gavilanes in January 2025 from Sailfish Royalty Corp as a low-cost opportunity to increase its exposure to the silver sector.
The project sits across 135 square kilometres including extensive untested veins and breccia zones extending over 2 kilometres, with previous drill coverage limited to less than 900m along strike.
The project hosts a foreign estimate of 2.83 million tonnes at 246 grams per tonne silver equivalent (AgEq) for 22.4 million ounces AgEq.
This is based on the completion of 48 diamond holes for 9,667.9m extending over a north-south trend of more than 700m.
Past drilling at Gavilanes returned multiple shallow intersections and strong silver grades with highlights of 6.3m at 2,016g/t silver from 77.2m, 3.3m at 2,540g/t silver from 109.8m, and 3.8m at 988g/t silver from 57.7m.
Planned Resource Upgrade
Managing director Dr Adam McKinnon said the maiden campaign represents the first on-ground exploration since the project’s acquisition.
“Following the successful delivery of our maiden 33Moz AgEq JORC Resource at Yoquivo, we are now applying the same disciplined and systematic approach at Gavilanes—combining targeted diamond drilling with a review and sampling of historical core to unlock value from another high grade Mexican silver system,” he said.
“Gavilanes already hosts a substantial high-grade foreign estimate and previous drilling has returned exceptional silver grades from shallow depths.”
“Our maiden program is designed to test extensions to the known mineralisation, assess new discovery targets and generate the data required to support a planned resource upgrade later this year.”
