Finite-state models of control systems were proposed by several researchers as a convenient mechanism to synthesize controllers enforcing complex specifications. Most techniques for the construction of such symbolic models have two main drawbacks: either they can only be applied to restrictive classes of systems, or they require the exact computation of reachable sets. In this paper, we propose a new abstraction technique that is applicable to any nonlinear sampled-data control system as long as we are only interested in its behavior in a compact set. Moreover, the exact computation of reachable sets is not required. The effectiveness of the proposed results is illustrated by synthesizing a controller to steer a vehicle.