Mapping with geopandas and basemapping with contextily

I find the geopandas library to be really useful for mapping with layers. Contextily is also a nice library that allows adding a background basemap. Using them together makes it fairly simple to visualize shapes such as polygons and points, together with contextual mapping information, such as in the following figure: Basemaps are drawn from OpenStreetMap under CC BY SA and map tiles are from Stamen Design, under CC BY 3.0. There are some  options for tile design. https://gist.github.com/rpasquini/395ecc6e5fafb1b6da2395f174dbda14 If embedded notebook does not render try here