This paper is dedicated to structure-preserving spatial discretization of shallow water dynamics. First, a port-Hamiltonian formulation is provided for the two-dimensional rotational shallow water equations with viscous damping. Both tangential and nor- mal boundary port variables are introduced. Then, the corresponding weak form is derived and a partitioned finite element method is applied to obtain a finite-dimensional continuous-time port-Hamiltonian approximation. Four simulation scenarios are investigated to illustrate the approach and show its effectiveness.