The playbook — gold · September 16, 2026
Auro drills 905 m of gold at Santa Barbara — length is the story
A near-continuous kilometre of 0.60 g/t gold, still open at depth, as a 20,000-metre Phase II program begins in southeast Ecuador.
Auro Metals drilled a single hole, DSB-68, that cut 905.22 metres grading 0.60 grams of gold per tonne — nearly a kilometre of continuous rock, each tonne carrying about six-tenths of a gram, plus 0.12% copper. The hole was drilled almost straight down (-85 degrees) and stopped in mineralization: the rig quit before the ore did. On the same day the company started a Phase II program of 20,000 metres, mobilizing three additional drill rigs (KD1700s). This is the same Santa Barbara porphyry — a large, low-grade gold-copper system in southeast Ecuador — that Auro injected when it renamed itself from Tincorp Metals in June 2026.
Think volume, not punch. A porphyry like this is judged on how much rock holds ore, not on rich veins. DSB-68’s 905 metres works out to roughly 543 gram-metres — genuinely big — and confirms the system runs past 1,000 metres depth. Other holes backed it up. DSB-69, collared about 120 metres east of DSB-66 to test the down-dip extension, hit 200.55 metres of 0.59 g/t from 247.45m to 448.0m downhole, including a richer 57.83 metres at 1.06 g/t. DSB-70, an infill hole, returned 262.5 metres of 0.71 g/t from just 10 metres down, with a 100.45-metre lower stretch at 1.01 g/t. Those grades sit at or above the existing inferred resource of 0.52 g/t inside a system already carrying more than 4.1 million ounces, with an independent SRK resource behind it. The team’s substance is Dr. Rui Feng, the Silvercorp founder, and QP Alex Zhang — not CEO Victor Feng, whose background is IR and corporate development. The stock rose 47.6% over three months while gold gained 0.9% and junior miners rose 6.7%, a company-specific move about seven times the peer index.
The caveat is width. The release states true width is unknown — the reported metres are core lengths, and in a steep porphyry drilled almost straight down the actual mineralized thickness could be materially less, by an amount the company does not quantify. The grades themselves are modest, 0.5 to 0.7 g/t, so length carries DSB-68. The copper-equivalent figures lean on aggressive metal prices and low copper recovery, so the gold-only numbers are the conservative read, and metallurgical recoveries are assumed — that testwork is only now starting. Watch for assays on the five remaining Phase I holes, DSB-71 through DSB-75, then Phase II results and the metallurgical program. A CFO resigned in November 2025, and the largest financing was done entirely at the insider level.