This paper presents a compositional approach to specification-guided abstraction refinement for control synthesis of a nonlinear system associated with a method to over-approximate its reachable sets. The control specification consists in following a lasso-shaped sequence of regions of the state space. The dynamics are decomposed into subsystems with partial control, partial state observation and possible overlaps between their respective observed state spaces. A finite abstraction is created for each subsystem through a refinement procedure, which starts from a coarse partition of the state space and then proceeds backwards on the lasso sequence to iteratively split the elements of the partition whose coarseness prevents the satisfaction o...