LOS ANGELES: Firefighters tackling wildfires across the state of California are gradually bringing blazes under control, the state's fire prevention service Calfire said Sunday.

A blaze in Santa Cruz county, 560 kilometers (about 350 miles) northwest of Los Angeles, that forced the evacuation of 2,000 people was 50 percent under control by Sunday morning, Calfire said on its website.

Despite the progress, the fire continued to threaten more than 250 homes in the communities of Swanton and Bonny Doon, and already has destroyed two buildings and more than 2,700 hectares of land, Calfire said.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger visited the affected areas on Saturday morning, after a state of emergency was declared in the county.

"My administration is doing all we can to ensure the state has the emergency response resources in place to quickly respond," he said.

Calfire said efforts to tackle the fires were hampered by winds, dry weather conditions and difficult terrain.

Another major fire has been burning since August 8 in the Los Padres national forest, north of Santa Barbara.

The fire has destroyed more than 34,000 hectares of land, but is now 60 percent under control, according to Calfire.

Los Padres officials said in a statement that they believed the blaze was started by a cooking fire in an illegal marijuana plantation, which police suspect belonged to a Mexican drug cartel.

The governor's office said Saturday that more than 47,000 hectares of land have been devoured by flames since August 1, and between 2,700 and 3,100 people have been evacuated.

California is frequently hit by wildfires and in 2007 suffered the worst blazes in its history, which forced the evacuation of 640,000 residents and destroyed around 2,000 homes in southern California. LINK