The Canadian miner said that, in December, production totaled 253.1oz and mill throughput was 3,037Mt. Average gold recovery was 73% with mill availability of 52%. The mine’s peak throughput was 211Mt/d.

Since its restart, the operation’s plant in Zarazoga has been processing lower-grade feed material in order to preserve the gold as efforts continue in order to up both throughput and gold recovery. The company cited multiple post start-up changes as well as the holiday season for low availability.

Para president Ian Harris confirmed that underground mining at El Limon will begin this month along with purchases of mineralised rock from small miners working on its property.

“The recovery at 73% is satisfactory considering this production has come from the preprocessing of historical tailings,” he said. “Recovery when processing from hard rock was 85%. We expect availability to improve dramatically over the next months to achieve our target of 85%.”

Para CEO stressed that the project’s major bottlenecks have been removed and gold recovery is on target.

Junior miner Para holds 80% of El Limon; it recently increased the mill’s capacity there to 100t/d and placed infrastructure for later production of 200t/d. The company also owns 88% of the Gold Road mine in Arizona’s Oatman District.