I can't figure out why the below code returns two subplots. If I comment out the first line (plt.subplots), I get one single map. But when it's included I get a huge whitespace first, just as I would if I specified 2 subplots and only put data in the second. I can't understand why.
This is not a reproducible example, what I'm looking for is if it's something my code is lacking.
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(4, 4))
#matplotlib.rcParams["figure.dpi"] = 250
ax.axis('off')
ax=lan.plot(color='lightgrey', edgecolor='black', linewidth=0.3)
ax.set_facecolor("lightskyblue")
ax=geo_df1.plot(edgecolor='black', column=geo_df1.rel_grp, ax=ax, cmap=my_cmp, linewidth=0.3, categorical=True)
fig.show(ax)

