The gardens are a popular destination for tourists and locals, as well as a favourite location for poetry festivals, photography exhibitions and art and craft fairs.

[2][3] Beginning with the mid-19th century, Copou's new green spaces became a favourite destination for local gentry and aristocracy, prompting the city's more modest families to avoid the area for fear of exposing themselves to dandyish sarcasm.

[4] Usual visitors included persons such as Aglaia Moruzzi (notorious for her annual Copou festivities), Marghiolița Rosetti Rosnovanu, Leon Bogdan, Natalia and Elena Suțu, Maria Catargi, and Dimitrie Mavrocordat.

[6] The memoirs of Alecu Russo confirm the tableaux: "Copou is the theatre where young men make their worldly debut, all melancholy and laid back in their carriages, the usual cigarette hanging from the corner of their mouths ... Copou is also a scene that our ladies like to use, big and small, young and old, ugly or beautiful, to compete for brightness in their eye-catching outfits".

[8] A social-anthropological pilot study done for the municipality in December 2013 found that for the modern visitor Copou Park had become a symbolic place: its secular trees, many of them limes, facilitated the expression of positive feelings towards the past, as well as of "incredulity, bitterness, alienation ... or aggressiveness" with regard to the local administration's controversial decision to replace (by felling) a linden tree alignment in the city centre with miniature Japanese shrubs (a decision later reversed, following a 2015 public referendum on the topic).