Artículo de publicación ISIThe present work is focused on the numerical approximation of the shallow water equations. When studying this problem, one faces at least two important issues, namely the ability of the scheme to preserve the positiveness of the water depth, along with the ability to capture the stationary states.We propose here aGodunov-typemethod that fully satisfies the previous conditions, meaning that the method is in particular able to preserve the steady states with non-zero velocity