The playbook — gold · October 27, 2026
Lundin's bonanza grades keep coming, and one hole sets a deposit record
124 g/t over 11 m near the plant and a 243 g/t slice at Bonza Sur, as the mine drills to grow what it already mines.
Lundin Gold reported another round of rich drill results from its Fruta del Norte mine in southeast Ecuador. The headline hole, FDN-C26-535 at the FDNS zone next to the plant, cut 124.27 grams of gold per tonne over 11.00 metres — that is roughly four ounces of gold in every tonne of rock, when a single gram a tonne is often worth mining. Inside it sat a 1-metre slice grading 1,290 g/t. At the Bonza Sur target, hole BLP-2026-559 returned 242.64 g/t over 3.30 metres, which the company calls the highest-grade interval ever recorded at the deposit. Lundin also started conversion drilling at FDN East, a zone less than 100 metres from existing mine infrastructure. When we last covered Lundin in September, assays were pending on several Bonza Sur holes, including this one — 559 has now landed.
Why it matters: these are top-decile numbers anywhere, and they are not a single lucky hole. The release carries dozens of strong FDNS intercepts — 7.6 m at 102.39 g/t, 6.25 m at 50.26 g/t, 3.2 m at 151.27 g/t — so the grade holds together across the zone. Most of this is conversion drilling: the company is upgrading lower-confidence inferred material to the indicated category and adding reserves at a mine already in production, which de-risks known rock rather than claiming new scale. FDNS already carries a 0.54-million-ounce inaugural reserve. The company is run by Jamie Beck, who as CEO of Filo Corp. oversaw a copper-gold-silver discovery bought out for $4.5 billion. Over the past three months the stock rose 7.6% while gold slipped 1% and the junior-miner index GDXJ barely moved at 1.7% — a company-specific move this time, not riding the sector.
What to watch: the company has flagged an integrated mine-to-mill plus FDNS expansion investment decision for the second half of 2026 — the mill decision we were watching in September remains open. Q3 2026 financials land November 4 after market close, with a call November 5, and the company targets a maiden resource for the Sandia copper-gold porphyry in Q1 2027. The caveats are plain. Every highlight is reported as drill-core length, not true width, and the company says some true widths narrow to a fraction of core length (one hole’s 2.35 m of core is 0.99 m true) — steep veins can look thicker than they are. No cut-off grade is stated; the tables apply a width-times-grade threshold instead. And the extreme single-sample grades — 1,290, 1,180, 1,090 g/t over sub-metre bites — signal coarse gold, where one nugget can dominate an interval average. The release repeatedly claims continuity at FDNS, FDN East and Bonza Sur but states no step-out distances or strike length, so how far any zone was extended is not given.