The Alturas high-sulphidation epithermal Au-Ag deposit is located in the El Indio Belt of northern Chile, located approximately 220 km east of the city of La Serena. The El Indio Belt straddles the border between Chile and Argentina; it is a ~150 x 20 km, north-south trending zone which contains other world-class deposits such as Pascua-Lama, Veladero, El Indio and Tambo.Current exploration methodologies for mineral deposits often use a combination of digital data collection methods to analyse chemistry (e.g. pXRF; Gazley et al. 2012; Gazley et al. 2015) and mineralogy (e.g. spectral core logging; Schodlok et al., 2016; Martini et al., 2017) from deposit- to core-scales. This study extends this analysis to the microscale to demonstrate the value of understanding element deportment and textural relationships at the sub-metre scale (e.g. Pearce et al. 2017). Here we present a microcharacterisation work flow that starts at the hand-sample scale using micro X-ray fluorescence (-XRF) mapping technology (Maia Mapper; Ryan et al. 2018a) and X-ray computed tomography (XCT) scanning, and finishes with representative sub-sampling focussing on areas with Au grains located by Maia mapping with key microstructures characterised by XCT scanning. The sample examined here, from Alturas, as an example of this analytical work flow, is a piece of half drill core from the quartz-alunite zone from drill hole DDH-ALT-052 at 237.74 237.92 m. CITATION: Pearce, M A, Gazley, M F, Godel, B M and Guerra, R, 2019. Multi-scale characterisation of path-finder element and gold microstructures, Alturas Au-Ag Deposit, El Indio Belt, Chile, in Proceedings PACRIM 2019, pp 117120 (The Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy: Melbourne).