Minefinders Consolidates La Virginia District in Sonora-Drilling Planned in

 

VANCOUVER, BC - Minefinders Corporation Ltd. reported the consolidation of all mineral rights and surface rights necessary to drill and test the La Virginia gold/silver district in Sonora, Mexico. The Company has staked mineral rights over more than 32,000 hectares of land and has also optioned an additional 2,100 hectares of mineral rights. More than 2,500 hectares of surface rights covering the main target areas have been leased allowing for exploration and exploitation within the district. Consolidation of these holdings allows Minefinders to test mineralized targets within the historically producing district and explore additional targets from within the overall land package.

Interest in the La Virginia gold/silver district was generated during the Company's 2007 helicopter reconnaissance program in which the Company located workings and preliminarily sampled the district to determine overall economic potential. Favorable results and recognition of a geologic setting very similar to that of the Company's Dolores deposit, located 100 kilometers to the southeast in Chihuahua State, led to the effort to consolidate the district.

The La Virginia District has never been drilled and contains untested targets. Sample results suggest a stockwork/vein system containing high grades of gold and silver over more than a kilometer of strikelength. Multiple mineralized structures occur within the district and additional potential for bulk-tonnage stockwork deposits also exist.

The gold-silver system at La Virginia occurs within the same geologic environment and setting as the Company's Dolores gold and silver mine. Mineralization at both occurs as quartz-calcite stockworks containing iron-oxides and sulphides associated with latitic dikes found within a thick sequence of andesitic flows and tuffs. At Dolores the mineralized system persists to a depth of more than 700 meters from surface, and along a strikelength that exceeds 4 kilometers. Drilling planned for 2010 will investigate overall potentials at depth and along strike within the main La Virginia district as additional target development and delineation work is accomplished throughout the Company's land holdings in the area.