BIG SUR, Calif. — On the eve of one of the biggest tourism weekends of the summer, rampaging wildfires are prompting the evacuation of a picturesque stretch of the California coast and blanketing other popular spots with a haze of brown smoke.

“It’s paradise. And paradise is burning,” Brian Courtney, 50, said as he sat outside a shuttered Big Sur restaurant and talked with neighbors awaiting what they viewed as an inevitable order to clear out of town.

“It’s very unsettling,” Mr. Courtney, an artist who lives several miles from the main road, Highway 1, said. “I’m waiting for somebody to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Get out.'”

During a visit yesterday to a firefighters’ camp at a state park on the outskirts of Big Sur, Governor Schwarzenegger pleaded with local residents to heed instructions to leave. “It’s tough to move out of your home. We understand it, but do it. Listen to our authorities and the people that know better,” the governor said. “We cannot think selfishly here and say, ‘I am going to stay in my house …’ and all those things. It doesn’t work.”

About 300 separate wildfires were burning across California yesterday, officials said. Most were uncontrolled and in the northern half of the state.

Mr. Schwarzenegger said roughly 1,400 fires had broken out in the past few weeks. “That is, I think, the most amount that anyone has ever heard in this state at one given time,” he said. “In the last two, three years we’ve seen there is really no fire season any more. It used to be that late summer into fall is the fires but now it’s all year round.”

The Basin Complex fire, which prompted the closure of about 20 miles of scenic Highway 1 in Big Sur, has consumed at least 52,000 acres since it broke out on June 21. Officials listed the blaze, which is believed to have been started by lightning, as only 3% contained yesterday.

“We have a very stubborn fire here,” Mr. Schwarzenegger said.

As if to prove the point, while the governor was touring the staging ground, the blaze leapt a fire break cleared by bulldozers and came over a ridge a few miles away. Where only smoke was visible earlier in the day, flames could be seen clearly, prompting some nervousness in the camp.

“This is a very treacherous fire, very difficult, very stubborn. Cranky is a good way to describe it,” the incident commander for the Forest Service, Michael Dietrich, said. “We’re doing everything that we can. … There is no end in sight. There is no finish line and, if this were a marathon, we’re at mile post 2.”

Mr. Courtney, who also works in construction, said many of the homes in jeopardy are essentially irreplaceable. “A lost of these people who have lost their homes, their homes are made of old-growth redwood, never to be built again,” he said.

Many local residents are attempting to protect their homes by applying a fire-retardant gel, which can be sprayed on with water from a garden hose. Mr. Courtney said one of his neighbors was reluctant to apply the gel because it can stain the wood. “He said, ‘But that will discolor it.’ I said, ‘Fire really discolors it,'” the artist said.

The spate of fires is being blamed on an unusual dry spell that has left much of Northern California with little or no rain for more than four months. “It’s exceedingly dry,” a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Monterey, Diana Henderson, said.

While some parts of California were walloped with snow and rain in February, totals for the season were about 70% of normal. “It’s one dry year on top of another,” Ms. Henderson said. “The conditions out here are just ripe for the fire situation.”

A drive down the coast from the San Francisco area yesterday offered stark contrasts. In Gilroy, known for its garlic festival, a light brown haze hung over the fields, which don’t grow much garlic anymore. In nearby Castroville, billed as America’s artichoke capital, the haze grew so thick the sun disappeared altogether. Approaching Monterey, the skies cleared.

Many of the coves in Carmel were also picture-postcard perfect. Turquoise waves turned to foam as they crashed on the rocky outcroppings. But, around other turns on the winding coastal highway, ominous clouds of smoke and ash wafted down from the mountains. In a few spots, the idyllic seaside scenes and the burning mountaintops were visible simultaneously.

Tourism-dependent stores and restaurants close to the fires said their business was off about 90% since the fires broke out. “It’s been very slow,” a retail shop employee, Amy Hall, 53, said. She said she saw no prospect of it improving for the holiday weekend. “That’s usually when our summer really kicks off. It’s not going to happen now. Not with the fire,” she said.

While several state parks and campgrounds were closed, Mr. Schwarzenegger said he hoped tourists will not call off their visits. “We have to protect, of course, our businesses, make sure that the people know it is safe to come here it is okay to come here. I mean, business goes on as usual,” the governor said in response to a question from The New York Sun.