To provide a process and an apparatus for completely separating heavy oil lumps drifted on shore and recovered together with sand into sand and heavy oil.

Sand-contaminated heavy oil lumps are introduced into a basket tumbled in a heavy liquid of saturated brine filled into an oil/sand separation tank 1 and heated to high temperature, crushed into finer easily meltable lumps. The finer lumps are separated into sand and heave oil, which floats owing to the difference between their specific gravities, and only the supernatant heavy oil is separated and recovered from a discharge trough 10. On the other hand, the sand having a larger specific gravity and settled to the sand collection pit 13 on the bottom a sand separation tank 1 is pulled up from the tank with a sand pull up bucket conveyor 12 and heated again to remove the residual oil, and continuously discharged from a sand discharge trough by means of a sand discharge trough conveyor 16. The heavy oil lumps are introduced into the basket 4 through a net conveyor 24. Sand not contaminated with heavy oil is screened by vertically tumbling the conveyor 24, and only the heavy oil lumps can be introduced. Therefore, a large amount of sand-contaminated heavy oil lumps can be continuously treated without extra energy consumption.