A phenomenological model Hamiltonian to describe the folding of a protein with any given sequence is proposed. The protein is thought of as a collection of pieces of helices; asa consequence its configuration space increases with the number of secondary structure elements rather than with the number of residues. The Hamiltonian presents both local (i.e., single helix, accounting for the stiffness of the chain) and non-local (interactions between hydrophobically-charged helices) terms, and is expected to provide a first tool for studying the folding of real proteins. The partition function for a simplified, but by no means trivial, version of the model is calculated almost;completely in an analytical way. The latter simplified model is also applied to the study of a synthetic protein, and some preliminary results are shown. (C) 1997 American Institute of Physics.