  It is widely believed that chiral symmetry is spontaneously broken at zero
temperature in the strong coupling limit of staggered fermions, for any number
of colors and flavors. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that this
conventional wisdom, based on a mean-field analysis, is wrong. For sufficiently
many fundamental flavors, chiral symmetry is restored via a bulk, first-order
transition. This chirally symmetric phase appears to be analytically connected
with the expected conformal window of many-flavor continuum QCD. We perform
simulations in the chirally symmetric phase at zero quark mass for various
system sizes L, and measure the torelon mass, the Dirac spectrum and the hadron
spectrum. All masses go to zero with 1/L. L is hence the only infrared length
scale. Thus, the strong-coupling chirally restored phase appears as a
convenient laboratory to study IR-conformality. Finally, we present a
conjecture for the phase diagram of lattice QCD as a function of the bare
coupling and the number of quark flavors.
