The playbook — silver · September 16, 2026
High-grade silver from pit to depth at Zgounder
Aya's infill drilling confirms rich silver across 97 holes at its producing Moroccan mine, while the stock outpaced its peer index by more than 26 percentage points.
On September 16, Aya Gold & Silver reported drill results from its Zgounder silver mine in Morocco’s Anti-Atlas belt. This was not a hunt for new discoveries. It was infill drilling — filling in the gaps between known holes to confirm how much silver is there and how it connects — across 97 holes at a mine that is already producing. Several intercepts came back genuinely rich. One hole cut 3.5 metres at 3,501 grams of silver per tonne, including a 1.5-metre core at 7,717 grams. Another returned 2.4 metres at 4,770 grams. Near surface, a pit hole cut 13 metres at 783 grams from the top down. This lands a week after we covered Aya’s Boumadine PEA, a separate Moroccan project.
Here’s why the numbers matter. In silver work, you multiply width by grade to get “gram-metres” — a single figure for how much metal a hole carries. Several of these clear 10,000 gram-metres, which for a silver system is a strong result. The real signal is consistency: many holes cluster at hundreds of grams with high-grade cores, and the grade shows up both near surface in the open pit and deeper in the central zone. That helps de-risk continuity for turning resource into reserve. Running the company is Benoit La Salle, who founded SEMAFO in 1995 and grew it past 250,000 ounces of gold a year before departing. The market has already responded: over three months AYA rose 26.7% to $37.41, while the junior silver index sat flat at 0.1% and silver itself fell 9%. That gap — outpacing its peer index by more than 26 percentage points while the metal dropped — points to a company-specific story, not a sector tide.
Now the caveats, and they are real. The release states plainly that true widths are undetermined and all values are uncut — so these core lengths may overstate how thick the zone actually is. Many of the headline intercepts come from percussion (air-hammer) drilling rather than diamond core, which gives lower confidence on grade. No cut-off grade was stated for the reported intercepts, and a few single-metre spikes at 7,717 and 4,000 grams drive some of the totals, raising the chance of a nugget effect. The CEO speaks of continuity around the pit and central zone, but the release does not state how far the zone was extended. From our prior coverage, Boumadine’s open items stay open: the NI 43-101 filing, a mining contractor tender in H1-2027, and a feasibility study in H2-2027. What to watch next: the company says fault-west drilling from the 1,825-metre level is targeted to begin in Q4, and management targets an updated resource and PEA for Boumadine in H2-2026.