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Colombia is famous for gold, emeralds, coal and oil, so silver rarely comes up when people talk about the country’s mineral wealth. Yet silver has a long and often overlooked history there. During the colonial period, Spanish miners worked a cluster of rich veins in what is now the Tolima region, and one district in particular, known as Mariquita, earned a reputation as the highest-grade primary silver district in the country. Records of mining in the area reach back to 1585. After centuries of colonial and small-scale artisanal work, most of those old workings were flooded or abandoned, and modern exploration largely passed the region by for decades.
That distinction matters because primary silver deposits, meaning ones where silver is the main prize rather than a byproduct of gold or copper mining, are relatively uncommon worldwide. Most of the silver produced globally comes out of the ground as a secondary metal alongside something else. A district where silver is the headline metal, and where grades are high, is therefore unusual, and it is part of what has drawn a small number of exploration companies back to Tolima in recent years.
One of those companies, Outcrop Silver & Gold Corporation (OTCQX: OCGSF, TSX: OCG), reported fresh drill results from two targets, Morena and Aguilar, on its Santa Ana project. The standout came from a hole labelled DH613 at Morena, which cut 0.71 metres grading 2,559 grams of silver equivalent per tonne. Inside that same intercept, a narrower 0.41 metre section ran an even richer 4,403 grams per tonne. A second Morena hole, DH601, returned 1.74 metres at 646 grams per tonne, and over at the Aguilar structure, hole DH631 delivered 0.30 metres at 2,033 grams per tonne. (Junior Mining Network)
For readers new to the terminology, silver equivalent is a way of rolling the value of more than one metal into a single number. Santa Ana carries both silver and gold, so the company converts the gold content into its silver equivalent using assumed prices, in this case $2,760 per ounce for gold and $32 per ounce for silver, along with metallurgical recovery rates of 98.5% for gold and 96.3% for silver. High grades on their own do not guarantee a mine, but they help an explorer map where the richest parts of a vein system sit.
The timing gives these results added weight. Outcrop plans to publish an updated mineral resource estimate in September 2026, and the Morena and Aguilar holes are among the data feeding into it. A resource estimate is the formal accounting of how much metal a project is thought to contain, and for an exploration company it is one of the most closely watched milestones. Santa Ana’s current estimate, filed in 2023, points to roughly 24.2 million ounces of silver equivalent in the indicated category and about 13.5 million ounces inferred.
The project itself is the reason the company exists. Outcrop owns 100% of Santa Ana, which spans more than 28,000 hectares in the Mariquita District and sits on ground that has been worked since 1585. Running through it is a fully permitted mineralized corridor about 17 kilometres long, and the current drill campaign has already confirmed silver and gold in six separate vein systems: Aguilar, Jimenez, La Ye, Los Mangos, Guadual and Morena. The company describes Aguilar, at roughly 1.6 kilometres long, as the largest of these, with Morena a smaller but high-grade addition to the picture.
None of this makes Santa Ana a producing mine yet. Exploration is a long process, and even strong drill results can fail to translate into an economic deposit. What the latest figures do is add depth to a project with unusually rich grades in a country not normally associated with silver, ahead of a resource update that will show how much of that promise holds up.
