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Photographs from the scene showed the charred remains of the bus on the roadside.

Boyko Rashkov, the Bulgarian interior minister, visited the site of the accident on Tuesday. “The picture is horrifying,” he told reporters, adding that the victims’ bodies had turned to ash, making it difficult to identify them. “I haven’t seen anything like this before.”

Seven survivors with burns and lacerations, including a teenage girl, were taken to Pirogov Hospital in Sofia, Maya Argirova, head of the burn clinic there, told reporters. The injured are in good condition and will be transported to Skopje when they have fully recovered, according to hospital officials.

Prime Minister Zoran Zaev of North Macedonia visited the hospital on Tuesday.

“It is a terrible tragedy because many of them are children,” Mr. Zaev said of the victims, adding that he had spoken to one of the injured who had managed to break a window of the bus and help several people escape. “He explained that they were sleeping on the bus when a loud explosion was heard,” Mr. Zaev said.

The cause of the fire is not yet known, but the Bulgarian authorities said that they were working swiftly to investigate the accident.

Stanislav Vladimirov, mayor of Pernik, a Bulgarian town close to the site, said that accidents were common in the area because of the notoriously dangerous roads.