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.