  The exploration of the spatial distribution of chemical abundances in
star-forming regions in galactic discs provides clues to understand the complex
interplay of physical processes that regulate the star formation activity and
the chemical enrichment across a galaxy. We study the azimuthal variations of
the normalized oxygen abundance profiles in the highest numerical resolution
run of the Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments (EAGLE)
Project at $z=0$. We use young stellar populations to trace the abundances of
star-forming regions. Oxygen profiles are estimated along different line of
sights from a centrally located observer.The mean azimuthal variation in the
EAGLE discs are $\sim 0.12 \pm 0.03$~dex~$R_{\rm eff}^{-1}$ for slopes and
$\sim 0.12 \pm 0.03$~dex for the zero points, in agreement with previous works.
Metallicity gradients measured along random directions correlate with those
determine by averaging over the whole discs although with a large dispersion.
We find a slight trend for higher azimuthal variations in the disc components
of low star-forming and bulge-dominated galaxies. We also investigate the
metallicity profiles of stellar populations with higher and lower levels of
enrichment than the average metallicity profiles, and we find that high
star-forming region with high metallicity tend to have slightly shallower
metallicity slopes compared with the overall metallicity gradient. The
simulated azimuthal variations in the EAGLE discs are in global agreement with
observations, although the large variety of metallicity gradients would
encourage further exploration of the metal mixing in numerical simulations.

Astrophysics of Galaxies