The remarkable story of Aurelian Resources and its discovery of Fruta del Norte – a blind gold deposit the company’s geologists found in the Cordillera del Condor in southeastern Ecuador – is one for the history books.
The narrative begins with Keith Barron, an exploration geologist who co-founded Aurelian in 2001, listed the company on the Toronto Venture Exchange in 2003, and along with Stephen Leary and Patrick Anderson discovered the multi-million ounce gold deposit in 2006, selling it two years later to
Kinross Gold (TSX: K; NYSE: KGC) for C$1.2 billion.
Perhaps less well known is that at the time of the discovery, Barron actually had been looking for two famous gold mining areas in the country, which historic Spanish documents and maps from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries referred to as ‘Sevilla del Oro’ and ‘Logroño de los Caballeros.’
That quest began somewhat serendipitously in 1998, when Barron, on a field leave from a job in Venezuela, happened to enrol in a Spanish language school in Quito, Ecuador’s capital city. To immerse himself in the language, Barron lived with a local family, the head of which was a history professor, Octavio Latorre, who had earned a PhD from Boston College.
Continue reading at The Northern Miner.
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