Cartopy: Can't add features to geo axes (no errors or warnings)
Question: I can't add features to cartopy geo axes. Here is an example from the
[gallery](http://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/latest/examples/features.html):

    
    
    import cartopy
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    
    def main():
    
        ax = plt.axes(projection=cartopy.crs.PlateCarree())
    
        ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.LAND)
        ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.OCEAN)
        ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.COASTLINE)
        ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.BORDERS, linestyle=':')
        ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.LAKES, alpha=0.5)
        ax.add_feature(cartopy.feature.RIVERS)
    
        ax.set_extent([-20, 60, -40, 40])
    
        plt.show()
    
    
    if __name__ == '__main__':
        main()
    

When I run this on my laptop at home I get nothing but a blank geo axes in the
figure (I can tell because the extents are correct and I can see the
coordinates in the bottom left hand corner of the figure window. BUT - if I
run this same example at work, everything plots as expected in the link.

My feeling is that there is some kind of dependency issue, but I'm not sure
where to start with this one. There are absolutely no warnings or errors of
any kind.

Both at work and on my laptop I am running Windows 7 x64 with Python 2.7 and
installed cartopy via windows binaries from
[here](http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/)

If I plot something myself like a contour plot then it does show up, but I
think there is something going wrong between getting the data from
naturalearthddata.com, processing the shape files, and adding them to the
axes.

Does anyone have any ideas on where to start with this one?


Answer: I wasn't getting this error previously, but when I ran the code from an
IPython notebook for some reason I got this error `HTTPError: HTTP Error 404:
Not Found`

What I ended up having to do was change line 264 in `shapereader.py` from:

    
    
     _NE_URL_TEMPLATE = ('http://www.nacis.org/naturalearth/{resolution}'
                            '/{category}/ne_{resolution}_{name}.zip')
    

To:

    
    
    _NE_URL_TEMPLATE = ('http://www.naturalearthdata.com/'
                            'http//www.naturalearthdata.com/download/{resolution}'
                            '/{category}/ne_{resolution}_{name}.zip')
    

Which was recommended in multiple places in the past including
[here](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/scitools-
iris/aawdQFPumpU/PjREeNlRZJAJ)

It has been mentioned that cartopy has since fixed this broken link to
naturalearth in the latest release, but I think the link is not updated in the
version of cartopy that I have installed via the mentioned windows binary. I
think this issue is fairly well documented, but for some reason I could not
see what the actual error was up until now.

