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Beneath the hills of Minas Gerais, Brazil, a drilling program has just turned up some of the richest gold intercepts a small mining company has reported in years. Jaguar Mining Inc. (OTCQX: JAGGF, TSX: JAG) announced that its early stage drilling at the Faina orebody, part of the Turmalina mine complex, has hit multiple zones of high grade gold. For a company that only resumed full operations at Turmalina in March 2026, the timing could hardly be better.
To understand why this matters, it helps to picture Turmalina not as a single mine but as a cluster of four connected ore bodies, labeled A, B, D and Faina, all sitting within the same underground shear zone. Faina sits to the northwest of where the company is currently mining, and until now it has been something of an unknown quantity. The new drill results change that. One hole, labeled FAI0178, returned 5.39 metres of rock averaging 11.88 grams of gold per tonne, with a smaller, richer section running as high as 17.99 grams per tonne. Another hole, FAI0182, returned a section averaging 22.46 grams per tonne over 3.13 metres, including a stretch as rich as 28.46 grams per tonne. For context, many commercial gold mines operate profitably on ore averaging just one or two grams per tonne, so these numbers stand out.
Geologically, the news is about more than just grade. The company says the results confirm what geologists call continuity, meaning the gold bearing zones extend both sideways and downward in a predictable pattern rather than appearing in random pockets. Armando José Massucatto, the company’s General Manager of Exploration, described the findings as validation of the long-term model for the Faina deposit, noting that they open the door to further exploration for additional gold both along strike and at depth. That kind of predictability matters enormously to a mining company, because it reduces the guesswork involved in planning where to dig next and how to design underground tunnels and mining chambers, known in the industry as stopes.
There is also a second, less obvious piece of good news buried in the announcement. When Jaguar began processing Faina ore through its plant in June, gold recovery rates, meaning the percentage of gold actually captured from the rock, reached approximately 70%. That compares favorably with the 55% recovery rate the company had observed in earlier laboratory and small-scale pilot testing. CEO Luis Albano Tondo attributed the improvement to a more intensive lime treatment step used earlier in the processing circuit, while cautioning that the results are still preliminary and based on a limited run of ore. If the higher recovery rate holds up over time, it would mean the company extracts meaningfully more gold from the same amount of rock, which has a direct impact on economics.
None of this means Faina is a fully proven deposit yet. The company has only drilled a handful of holes so far, and it has now launched a new drilling campaign aimed at testing how far the mineralized zones extend, both deeper underground and along the length of the shear zone. Jaguar also plans additional metallurgical testing to determine whether the recovery improvement can be replicated consistently as more Faina ore moves through the plant.
What this announcement really represents is an early data point in a longer story. Jaguar Mining is trying to expand what geologists call its mineral resource base, essentially the inventory of gold it can plan to mine in the years ahead, and Faina appears to be a meaningful new contributor to that inventory. Investors and industry watchers will be looking for the next round of drill results to see whether the high grades reported here extend across a wider area, and whether the metallurgical gains at the plant hold steady as production ramps up.
