Avrupa Minerals (TSX-V: AVU)(OTC: AVPMF) CEO Paul Kuhn on Advancing Multiple Copper-Zinc-Gold Projects in Portugal, Finland & Kosovo

Paul Kuhn: Hey, Gerardo. Yeah, I'm doing fine. I hope you're doing well as well. I'm in Portugal and, yeah, things are going great here. Avrupa is making some real progress and I'm happy to tell you about it.

Paul Kuhn: Thank you.

Paul Kuhn: Sure, Gerardo, glad to. Avrupa is a prospect generator. It's probably a term that's not so welcome these days in the exploration business but we've done a really good job over the years. We've made a number of discoveries in Portugal and in Kosovo. And we're now really pushing it in the Portugal program because we've got a great partner with Sandfire MATSA and they're spending quite a bit of money to move the program forward.

We have mineralization on the Alvalade license, and we have a whole pile of other targets that we haven't even touched with the drill rig yet. So Avrupa has made this discovery in 2014 at Sesmarias, and it's been on-again/off-again for the last eight years. But since late in 2020, we have moved the project forward with MATSA, now Sandfire MATSA.

In addition, Avrupa made a discovery in Kosovo; a little gold deposit called Slivovo, which we are, hopefully, on the verge of getting back into our portfolio in the next few weeks. The Mining Bureau of Kosovo has had a long, how should I say, lull in business because they didn't have a properly elected board.

But now they do, and they're going through all of the old applications for the past two years, and we're getting to our point on the list. So we may have a little gold deposit back into our portfolio, as well as the Finnish projects, which we just acquired in the last month or so and are beginning work on already.

Paul Kuhn: Your guess is as good as mine on that one. There are things that I will not say on air, sorry. But basically, I think we've been ignored because this has gone along a little bit slowly. We made the discovery in 2014 with the support of another partner and we made quite a splash. But then, the market for junior companies kind of disappeared and we had a partner that failed.

And then, we raised some money. Mark Brown and CFO Winnie Wong went out and raised some funds to allow us to do a bit of drilling back in 2018-19. But the market has lost interest a little bit. We're not promoters; we tell it like it is… and if there isn't anything there, we don't tell about it or move on. But this project has been going on for eight years now, and now it's getting some steam. So I am looking forward to getting the market cap to something reasonable.

We have a nice deposit. It's not a mine yet. It's getting bigger and bigger each time we drill. We are at some depth; it's not at the surface. And the best thing about it is we've got a great team that's putting together a really good story for our partner who is a massive sulfide miner.

We really have a great partner in the fact that they know how to mine; they know what's mineable; they're supportive. And they're open-minded at looking at continuing this. So the market cap, knock on wood, with more good news should change.

Paul Kuhn: Well, this is a tough one. Our partner has other obligations in Portugal, and there's only one drill rig available. So we've allowed them, we jointly agreed to this too, to get some work done on their other properties before they have to do their commitments for their licenses.

So we are doing field exploration. But really, right now, the drilling will not start again until June. So we cannot expect results after this latest one for a few months. It sounds bad but it's really a good thing. We're allowed some time now to regroup and plan some serious drilling when we get the rig back in June.

And when I mean serious drilling, we've got to drill underneath or below the fences that we've already done. We know there's more mineralization below. We know there's more mineralization along strike to the south. And we haven't even touched that 1.1 kilometers, which, I will add, is probably closer to 1.5 kilometers of known mineralization.

So there's a hell a lot to do, and this little bit of a break is good for us. We'll get a big plan going. We're talking about Sesmarias, Gerardo, but I've got half a dozen other drillable targets ready to go on the rest of the Alvalade license.

Paul Kuhn: Yes.

Paul Kuhn: Well, I'd like to talk about Finland briefly, or in a brief minute. But just to reiterate the point about the Alvalade Project, we've got 115 square kilometers of, how should I say, targetable land out there. It's a strike length of somewhere around 20 kilometers of pyrite belt rocks, some of which we've not even looked at yet.

And so there could be a lot of catalysts. But the first one is obviously going to be Sesmarias; increased strike length to the south and potentially increased strike length to the north. And we've got depth; the hinge of this incline. Now, basically we're looking at a U or maybe a J, let's say. The east wing is the tall side. The hinge is the bottom. And the west limb is the short end of the J, let's say.

And we're drilling… we're getting one wing at a time, sometimes the one limb and the hinge. We've got a lot of ways to increase the tonnes here and hopefully the grade. A half percent copper is good but we want to see 1% copper. And that's what we're really aiming for.

Paul Kuhn: Yep. Can I say a little bit about Finland for you?

Paul Kuhn: Yep. Well, we needed to breathe a little bit of life into the company. Part of the story, part of the answer to your previous question, is we needed to get our exploration pipeline going again.

We had a number of tough years and we realized that Alvalade wasn't enough to get people excited. So I spent the last year looking around Europe for good ideas. I looked at something pretty cool in Sweden that I still would like to follow. I looked at something in Serbia that's of interest to me but a little bit maybe beyond my reach still. And I'm looking at a couple of things in Ireland as well. But we ended up with the idea in Finland.

As I've told you, we met the owner of a small, private exploration company working in a very busy, or formerly busy, copper-zinc massive sulfide belt. He had a bunch of reservations in this belt; a lot of free land that he was able to acquire. And we met through this pandemic… we met through the internet on some Zoom calls and stuff. And the properties have got mineralization on them already.

There are known massive sulfide mineralization on two of the three projects or reservations in this belt. It's called the Pyhäsalmi VMS belt. There are some formerly operating mines. There's a live concentrator in the district. There are several large companies looking around, including Boliden. So there are potential partners if we move this forward.

But right now, we've got three more copper-zinc projects. And we all know copper and zinc are important these days. But in this acquisition, we also picked up a gold property a little bit further to the north, which really has no strong back work other than being on strike with a known gold deposit discovered by Agnico Eagle 10 years ago.

So Finland is going to be our news for the next few months. We're revitalizing the Avrupa pipeline. We're going to pick up another license, I presume, in Kosovo. But right now, Finland is going to be, for the next couple of months, it's going to be the noisy one.

Paul Kuhn: Yep, that there is. And we'll be putting out some news on Finland shortly. We've just started work there. It's not going to be rocketing news. But we've just started reviewing some core in the core shed of the geological survey of Finland in Rovaniemi.

The reason we picked these four drill holes on the Kolima Project is that they have mineralization in them, and we want to have a look at the mineralization. It's never been sampled. It was logged originally, maybe, in the '70s. There's a lot of hope of missed opportunities, and that's how we've operated.

We're working in places where there's known mineralization… where there's a lot of previous drilling, which means for us, instead of spending €60,000 for a drill hole, we're spending €2,000 to get the information. And then, we get to look at the core. So it's a good deal financially.

But there's just a pile of information in this district in Finland, and we've just started on the first of the three reservations there. It's called Kolima, and we'll put some news out on it hopefully next week if I can get my diagrams going.

Paul Kuhn: Sure, Gerardo. I'm looking forward to chatting with you again about all these areas. It'll be a good talk.

Paul Kuhn: Alright, catch you later. Thank you.