(Kitco News) Tiger Gold is planning a far bigger mine than the one it bought into at its Quinchía gold project in Colombia. CEO Robert Vallis says the company is now working toward production “north of 250,000 ounces a year.”
That would be well above the roughly 140,000 ounces a year the project’s 2025 preliminary economic assessment outlined for its first five years. “We’re working towards a near double of our resources” and the same for production potential, Vallis told Kitco Mining on Oct. 5.
Tiger picked up Quinchía, in the Mid-Cauca belt of Risaralda department, from an Australian company that had parked it. “The project was already on care and maintenance for about two years when we arrived in mid 2024,” Vallis said. Tiger completed a 7.5 million in staged payments for full ownership in June, with a 6.5 million more due at the first gold pour and a 1% net smelter return royalty.
Gold prices have done much of the heavy lifting since then. Completed in September 2025, the PEA showed an after-tax net present value of US$534 million at a 5% discount rate and a 21.3% internal rate of return at US$2,650 gold. At US$3,700 per ounce, those figures rose to about US$1.19 billion and 36.5%. “The torque that’s delivered through the metal price is significant,” Vallis said.
The study combined Miraflores, a small underground mine permitted in 2024, with Tesorito, which holds about 1.57 million ounces of inferred gold. The larger concept leans on open pits. “Yes, Miraflores was originally permitted as a small underground, but the bulk of the potential so far that we’re discovering is open pit,” Vallis said.
Tesorito drilling wrapped up on Sept. 30 after 12,124 meters in 48 holes, with assays from 19 holes still to come. Infill drilling there has returned grades above the current model along a trend through the deposit, including 234.54 meters at 1.2 grams per tonne gold in hole TSDH-88, the company said on Oct. 7. All three rigs are now at Ceibal, about a kilometer south of Miraflores, where Vallis said a maiden resource “has the potential to be at least the scale of the existing Tesorito deposit.”
On Oct. 19, Tiger reported that hole CEDDH-023 at Ceibal returned 268 meters grading 0.5 g/t gold from surface, carrying mineralization south into untested ground. True widths are unknown, and the top 26.8 meters may partly reflect supergene enrichment. Mineralization at Ceibal has been traced about 800 meters below surface and remains open to the west and southwest, where four more holes are testing for extensions. More than 10,100 meters have been drilled there so far.
The next milestones are an updated Tesorito resource in early 2027, then a maiden Ceibal resource and an updated PEA covering all three deposits near the end of the first quarter, before prefeasibility work begins. “We’ve only drilled 20% of our project to date,” Vallis said. Once resource drilling ends in November, the rigs will turn back to exploration, including deeper targets.
Depth is already showing more than gold. Copper and molybdenum remain below payable levels, but “the deeper we drill, the more of that we start to find,” Vallis said, which he reads as a sign of a larger feeder system below. Earlier this year Tiger reported a gold-copper-molybdenum interval beneath the Tesorito resource that included 6 meters at 4.1 g/t gold and 0.43% copper.
A bigger mine means new permits. Vallis said the existing Miraflores license has already cleared much of the expanded footprint environmentally, but the design is now a different project. “We actually see a significant opportunity really to reboot the permitting process, but leverage off of gains that have already been made,” he said.
Vallis credited Colombia’s new government with what he called “stated and unwavering support of the industry.” He said the country has made clear it will not permit open-pit coal mining while treating metals as “open for business.” Tiger’s approach, he said, is to do the engineering first. “When you rush into things, you can cut corners, and in this industry, they invariably come back to bite you.”
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