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    Royal Road underground mine potential at Guintar: drilling takeaways for engineers

    March 19, 2026|

    Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

    Royal Road underground mine potential at Guintar: drilling takeaways for engineers

    First reported on MINING.com

    30 Second Briefing

    Royal Road Minerals’ latest drilling at the Guintar-Aleman-Margaritas project in Antioquia, Colombia, points to a bulk-tonnage underground scenario, with hole GUI-DD-028 returning 76 metres at 2.1 g/t gold, 0.4% copper and 7.9 g/t silver from 45 metres depth. CEO Tim Coughlin reports a porphyry-skarn system extending from surface over more than 2 sq. km and beyond 500 metres depth, overprinted by steep, high-grade quartz-carbonate veins. The 2,500-metre 2026 campaign, following 13,700 metres in 43 prior diamond holes, targets continuous mineralisation that remains open at depth.

    Technical Brief

    • GUI-DD-031 intersected 15 m at 1 g/t Au, 0.6% Cu, 11.3 g/t Ag from 130 m.
    • Mineralisation in GUI-DD-031 is continuous from surface to end-of-hole over 193.7 m.
    • More than half of the 43 historic diamond holes (13,700 m total) terminated in mineralised intervals.
    • Guintar lies ~50 km east of Medellín within an established Antioquia gold-mining district hosting multiple producing operations.
    • Drilling was paused after 2022 to prioritise regulatory and permitting work, then restarted two months ago.
    • Royal Road acquired Guintar and Margaritas from AngloGold Ashanti in 2019 via a country-wide licence package.
    • Company-wide, Royal Road controls over 1,800 sq. km of Colombian mining concessions and applications, indicating substantial regional upside.

    Our Take

    AngloGold Ashanti’s role at Guintar-Aleman-Margaritas sits alongside its recent exploration success at the Silicon project in Nevada and its equity move into Thesis Gold, signalling that the major is keeping optionality in higher-grade gold–copper systems across the Americas rather than exiting early-stage positions outright.

    The 2 sq. km porphyry–skarn system with mineralisation traced beyond 500 metres depth at Guintar is large by Colombian standards in our database, which tends to favour underground block cave or bulk stoping concepts over open pit in similarly constrained Andean terrains.

    With Royal Road’s market value around C$53 million and only four new holes planned this year, the scale of the Guintar system implies that any move to an underground mine concept in Antioquia will likely need either a strategic partner or staged de-risking similar to other Latin American copper–gold juniors in our coverage.

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    Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.

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