The bus was carrying 57 passengers to Lima, Peru’s capital, when it was hit by a truck and tumbled down a slope to a rocky beach, the police said.
LIMA, Peru — At least 48 people were killed Tuesday when a bus tumbled down a cliff onto a rocky beach along a narrow stretch of highway known as the “Devil’s Curve,” Peruvian police and fire officials said.
The bus was carrying 57 passengers to Lima, Peru’s capital, when it was struck by a tractor-trailer shortly before noon and plunged down the slope, said Claudia Espinoza, who is with Peru’s voluntary firefighter brigade.
The bus landed upside-down on a strip of shoreline next to the Pacific, the bodies of its passengers strewn among the rocks.
“It’s very sad for us as a country to suffer an accident of this magnitude,” President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski said in a statement.
Rescuers had to struggle to help survivors and recover the dead from the hard-to-reach area in Pasamayo, about 43 miles north of Lima.
No road leads directly to the beach, complicating rescue efforts, Ms. Espinoza said. Police officers and firefighters used helicopters to transport six survivors with serious injuries to nearby hospitals. At least three people were missing.
Traffic accidents are common along Peru’s roads, with more than 2,600 people killed in 2016. More than three dozen people died when three buses and a truck collided in 2015 on the main costal highway. Twenty people were killed in November when a bus plunged off a bridge into a river in the southern Andes.
The nation’s deadliest traffic crash on record happened in 2013 when a makeshift bus carrying 51 Quechua Indians in southeastern Peru fell off a cliff into a river, killing everyone on board.
Ms. Espinoza said the passengers in Tuesday’s crash included many returning to Lima after celebrating the New Year’s holiday with family outside the city.
The highway is known as the “Devil’s Curve” because it is narrow, frequently shrouded in mist and curves along a cliff that has been the site of numerous accidents. The police said the bus fell more than 260 feet.
Miguel Sidia, a transportation expert in Peru, said that while road conditions had improved in recent years, lack of driver education and little enforcement of road rules still lead to many fatalities each year.
He called on the authorities to immediately conduct studies into building a new highway farther from the cliff where the accident occurred.
“As a Peruvian, it’s shameful,” he said.
