Trembling and sobbing, Constantina Layme moved from one muddied corpse to another, searching for her daughter in the main square of this colonial town after an earthquake levelled its church during a mass.

Before her in Pisco's central plaza lay the bodies of about 50 of the more than 400 people killed when a huge 8.0-magnitude earthquake rattled Peru's Pacific coast late on Wednesday.

"I'm looking for my daughter. They said she went to the church," Layme, 40, said on Thursday, looking at the top of the plaza where a place of sanctuary and prayer was turned into a tomb. "Maybe she's hurt, I don't know."

Most of the corpses in the plaza came from the adobe-brick church, where around 20 firemen, police and soldiers were digging alongside a large mechanical shovel in search of survivors, or more bodies.

Pisco is best known as a jumping off point for tourists going to view wildlife at the Paracas Nature Reserve and drink the famous grape liquor that takes its name from this town of about 120,000 people.

But it was a place of despair on Thursday.

Enrique Gonzales, a 48-year-old worker, was in the plaza looking for his wife and three sisters-in-law. They had been in the church attending a commemorative ceremony for a dead loved one when the earthquake struck.

"What you see before you is the picture of a family that has only young children in it now," he said. "I have three little boys now, but I don't have a house, because it fell down."

Around him, people filed into the plaza to look for relatives and friends, most of them humble with threadbare clothes and hard-lined faces.

As more bodies were brought into the plaza, Jose Aquije, a local prosecutor, said he feared many would not be identified because their own family members were dead or injured.

Nearby a father and daughter lay in an embrace, as they were found dead in the church rubble.

Next to them three boys, aged around 10, 3 and 18 months, likely brothers, lay side by side.