Runtime error when importing basemap into spyder
(Spyder maintainer here) This error was fixed in our 3.2.8 version, released in March/2018.
Since you're using Anaconda, please open the Anaconda prompt and run there
conda update spyder
to get the fix.
I installed spyder onto my computer a few months ago and it has worked fine until I needed to produce a map with station plots and topography. I simply tried to import matplotlib-basemap and get the following error:

File "<ipython-input-12-6634632f8d36>", line 1, in 
  runfile('C:/Users/Isa/Documents/Freedman/2018/ENVIROCOMP/Stationplots.py', wdir='C:/Users/Isa/Documents/Freedman/2018/ENVIROCOMP')
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\spyder\utils\site\sitecustomize.py", line 710, in runfile
      execfile(filename, namespace)
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\spyder\utils\site\sitecustomize.py", line 101, in execfile
      exec(compile(f.read(), filename, 'exec'), namespace)
File "C:/Users/Isa/Documents/Freedman/2018/ENVIROCOMP/Stationplots.py", line 15, in 
      from mpl_toolkits.basemap import Basemap, shiftgrid, cm
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 971, in _find_and_load
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 951, in _find_and_load_unlocked
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 890, in _find_spec
File "<frozen importlib._bootstrap>", line 864, in _find_spec_legacy
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\pyximport\pyximport.py", line 253, in find_module
      fp, pathname, (ext,mode,ty) = imp.find_module(fullname,package_path)
File "C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\lib\imp.py", line 271, in find_module
      "not {}".format(type(path)))
RuntimeError: 'path' must be None or a list, not <class '_frozen_importlib_external._NamespacePath'>

If anyone has gone through this or understands this type of error suggest a way to make basemap work on spyder?